ADBA News
ADBA CHIEF EXECUTIVE GIVES EVIDENCE TO EFRA COMMITTEE ON FOOD WASTE
Our Chief Executive, Charlotte Morton, has called for mandatory separate food waste collections in England at the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (EFRA) Committee’s inquiry into food waste in England. Charlotte said that it is ‘mind-bogglingly obvious that we should be separating out food waste and recycling it’, and pointed out that a lack of mandatory separate food waste collection means that we are missing an opportunity to reduce food waste, and preventing valuable resources from being extracted from the waste stream to be recycled through AD. She cited the example of Milan as an urban area that has been successful in separately collecting food waste and sending it for recycling through AD.
Charlotte also noted that cost benefit analyses need to recognise that, while waste management authorities might bear any upfront costs of separate food waste collections (where not offset, for example, by more infrequent residual waste collections), some of the benefits that result from AD, such as greenhouse gas (GHG) abatement and renewable energy production, accrue to the UK as a whole. Charlotte quoted the World Resource Institute’s figure that if food loss and waste were a country, it would be the third biggest emitter of GHG emissions, behind the US and China.
AD CAN BE AT THE HEART OF THE UK BIOECONOMY
WHAT’S THE FUTURE FOR HEAT IN NON-DOMESTIC BUILDINGS?
Late January also saw us submit our response to BEIS’ consultation on the future of heat in non-domestic buildings. We urged BEIS to consider the numerous benefits of AD and its carbon cost effectiveness as a producer of low carbon heat. With the right policies in place to support research and development of new feedstocks, we estimate that the AD industry could generate around 35 TWh by 2020-25 and around 80 TWh by 2030-35.
In late January, we submitted our response to BEIS’ call for evidence on the UK bioeconomy. Our response puts forward strong arguments on the role AD can play in supporting the UK economy, achieving sustainability, and attracting investment in the UK. We also set out what is required to achieve significant growth in the UK biogas industry, such as funding for research and development, and stable and supportive government policies, and provided evidence of the UK AD industry’s opportunity to be at the heart of the growing global biogas industry, now estimated to be worth £1 trillion.
Our response notes that further growth in the bioeconomy could be achieved by building on UK academic expertise, supporting on-farm and agricultural AD, solving the global food waste problem, exporting waste management technologies, and developing anaerobic biorefineries. We also identified the important contribution further growth in AD would make to decarbonisation, sustainability and food security. Our submission will also contribute to informing BEIS’ Industrial Strategy. For more information, see Policy, p33
6 AD & BIORESOURCES NEWS | SPRING 2017
www.adbioresources.org adbioresources.org
Our response also discussed the important role biogas is playing in decarbonising the supply of heat. We addressed the significant opportunities to build on this success by integrating heat networks in existing and new sites through government support schemes such as the Heat Network Investment Project. The Renewable Heat Incentive does not provide support for network infrastructure to deliver heat to the end user, and in fact, the cost of infrastructure to deliver low carbon heat to end users has proved prohibitively high for the majority of AD plants.
The role of AD in the low carbon provision of heat will be an ongoing topic during 2017 and in the years to come. If you have any comments on our response or suggestions for contributions to future work, please contact
thom.koller@adbioresources.org
Charlotte also called on the Environment Agency to enforce the waste hierarchy, pointing out that it is ‘their duty to do so’.
The full video of the evidence session and ADBA’s full written response to the inquiry can be found on the EFRA Committee website at
http://bit.ly/1rBtDTc
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