ORGANICS RECYCLING
All eyes on Wales
From April this year, local authorities in Wales will start collecting separated food waste from households. Dr Adam Read, Brian Mayne and Nia Owen look at the challenges this poses for the country’s fledgling anaerobic digestion industry
10-15 years. In its Towards Zero Waste strategy, the Welsh Government laid out its stall by setting a target of 70% composting and recycling by 2025. For most sectors, these are non-stat- utory targets but for local authorities there is a real onus to deliver; from this month councils have a statutory duty to collect household food waste sepa- rately. After prevention and reuse, the Welsh Government’s preferred option for food waste is anaerobic digestion (AD), an important source of renew- able energy and fertiliser as well as a valuable contributor to the reduction in waste to landfill and associated car- bon emissions.
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To underpin its ambition to drive up recycling, the Welsh Government has put funding in place to support the
12 Local Authority Waste & Recycling March 2012
nlike its larger neigh- bour, Wales has voiced some real ambition in driving up recycling rates over the next
uptake of facilities in the public and private sectors. As a further incentive to promote AD, double ROCs (renew- able obligation certificates) will be pay- able on energy produced via AD. As part of its long-term strategy to foster an AD industry, local authori- ties will have access to £26M through the Strategic Capital Investment Fund to support the procurement of AD facilities. Funding allocation, however, will be conditional on meeting cer- tain criteria in the commercial and legal agreements needed to deliver AD plants. Building up sufficient AD capacity is an issue and at present a series of local authority procurement projects exist, all at different stages in the design, build, financing and opera- tion of long-term contracts for treating food waste by AD.
These projects, using the competi- tive dialogue process, all explore the capability of the sector to market the digestate, and produce energy, which
includes the supply of biogas and/or heat and/or electricity to neighbour- ing users, contracting local authorities and/or the National Grid. NEAT Biogas,
a joint venture
between Alkane Energy and TEG Environmental (see LAWR February 2012, page 24) is the preferred bidder for the first of the new AD plants. Located in Rhuallt, near St Asaph, Denbighshire, northeast Wales, the plant will treat a mix of organic waste, mainly kitchen waste collected from households in Denbighshire, Flintshire and Conwy.
The facility has the capacity to pro- cess 20,000 tonnes of organic waste per year. Of this, 11,000 tonnes will come from the three procuring local authori- ties. The remainder will be sourced from other councils and businesses that generate food waste in the region. As part of the local authority procure-
ment processes previously mentioned, there is the potential for an additional
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