With the West Midlands sending over half its waste to landfill and the uncovering of controversial plans for a super-incinerator, Nicky Conway, from the sustainable development organisation Forum for the Future, argues the region could be making much more of what it throws out
Of all the waste that UK households generate, more goes to landfill and less is recycled than any other European country, except Portugal and Greece.
Households in the West Midlands alone produce more than 19 million tonnes of waste every year – enough to fill the Millennium Dome six times over!
While nationally the general trend is downwards, waste is increasing in parts of the West Midlands. In Warwickshire, for instance, is it going up at a rate of three per cent every year.
So what happens to all the waste produced by the West Midlands at the moment? Most (53 per cent) is sent off to landfill. But this is where the problems begin. We’re fast running out of landfill capacity, with the region forecast to run out of landfill space by 2011.
The EU landfill directive that came into effect last year attempts to address the impending crisis by imposing progressively more stringent constraints on the amount of waste that local authorities can dispose of in landfills.
Warwickshire County Council, for example, will only be permitted to landfill 52,897 tonnes by 2020 – 35 per cent on 1995 levels.
In addition authorities face hefty fines of £150 per tonnes for every tonne of waste that is landfilled over the allowances – a cost the taxpayer will end up shouldering. And there’s another problem with landfill. Putting economics to one side, the methane that is produced from landfills is one of the most potent greenhouse gases, clearly an issue in light of the escalating problem of climate change.
There’s no denying that we need new, innovative solutions if we’re to reduce the amount of waste that goes to landfill. We need new ways to solve these problems and all of this is a real catalyst to look at more innovative and sustainable ways of dealing with our waste. The easiest, most cost effective and most sustainable way has to be to follow the waste hierarchy – otherwise known as reducing, reusing and recycling.
If we start with reducing, waste minimisation has to be at the heart of waste management. The best way to deal with waste is to not produce it in the first place.
For example, businesses can become much more efficient in the way they use resources. Likewise consumers can choose not to buy goods wrapped in layers of packaging.
When it comes to reuse and recycling, businesses need to see waste a resource, the same as any other raw material.
Waste is big business in Europe, providing more than 1.5 million jobs with an estimated turnover of 100 billion euros per annum.
Local authorities, as the main body responsible for managing waste, are key to putting in place the right information and incentives to help businesses and householders change the way we approach waste. There are a number of things they can do.
Firstly, make it easy for people. Collect their bulky items, and collect ALL recyclables from the kerbside.
With five types of colour coded rubbish bins for apartments and houses, easy kerbside rules in Germany mean that you can’t not participate.
Over time we should reduce the amount of room in bins to encourage waste minimisation. Councils can also provide free composters’ for homes and businesses and community compost sites close to the point of generation (approximately 30 per cent of household waste is potentially compostable and another 30 per cent recyclable).
Incentivise! Authorities should introduce council tax discounts and reward schemes for people who compost and recycle. We can learn from Switzerland, where recycling is free and there’s only a cost for any leftover rubbish you throw away.
They also need to start procuring recycled goods. With more than £18 billion spent by local authorities annually, they have enough buying power to create significant market demand for services that encourage waste minimisation and recycled goods.
Warwickshire has taken much of this on board in its recent waste strategy, with an ambitious recycling target of 60 per cent by 2020 (27.6 per cent of waste is currently recycled in the Warwickshire and 18 per cent in the West Midlands county).
They also have a desire to move up the ‘waste hierarchy’ – from reducing to reusing and then recycling. The challenge will be in matching the rhetoric with enough resources and political will to see it through.
But this still leaves the question of what to do with the waste that’s left over – commonly know as residual waste.
Waste is not traditionally seen as a good neighbour and some disposal methods are simply unsustainable. One of the most unsustainable is large-scale incineration.
The biggest problem with large-scale incinerators is that they perpetuate the need for waste. They are fuel-hungry, needing upwards of 200,000 tonnes every year just to keep going.
It’s hard to predict exactly how much waste will be generated in 20 years time. We’ve seen a radical change over the last few years with a nationwide reduction in overall waste generated for the first time and a sharp increase in recycling.
This is thanks, in part, to public education and better recycling facilities. But if we’re truly moving towards proper resource management, large scale incinerators may not be the best of all possible options.
The attraction is that they often appear to be the cheapest means of eliminating the waste whilst also creating electricity.
However, there is a great deal of evidence that energy from waste plants cannot be delivered on time and on budget, due to planning issues.
It’s not uncommon to take more than ten years to get planning permission due to local opposition and waste contractors, understandably will no longer be prepared to take the planning risk as part of any public private finance contracts.
Another common argument for incinerators is that energy from waste is classified as a renewable energy. Really it is nothing of the kind – waste should not be viewed as a resource that we have a constant renewable flow of – it should be seen as something we are constantly minimising and recycling, not burning.
Quite simply, there are better ways to generate renewable energy than burning waste.
The UK, quite rightly, is moving towards adopting the principle of self-sufficiency in how we dispose of waste. This means that disposal should be contained within county boundaries to avoid offloading our problems elsewhere.
Having one centralised incinerator to deal with a county's waste would mean that waste is trucked across the county from one end to the other. If the fire goes hungry, waste from elsewhere is imported into the area creating more congestion, pollution and CO2 emissions from the trucks.
Fundamentally, locking ourselves into a long-term contract of this nature excludes other alternatives.
Warwickshire County Council has experienced first hand what a contentious issue this can be. Its choice of ‘best practice environmental option’ includes a centralised large-scale waste incinerator. This has sparked off an ongoing debate within parts of the community that vehemently oppose this choice for the very reasons explored above.
In addition, the council predicts that by 2020, the county will generate around 204,000 tonnes of biodegradable waste every year, which would only just cover the need for a plant. It’s possible that in time the plant would no longer commercially viable.
So what are the alternatives? Are there other ways that we can get rid of our waste, produce energy and be more sustainable?
Yes, there are. Small-scale energy from waste is used very successfully all over Europe. Small being the important word here.
In Denmark plants are owned by the community so that they have a say in what’s built, how they’re run and profit directly from the operation. Heat and power generated from the plants is sold. It also means there is no need for waste transfer stations and reduces transportation costs.
Other technologies include gasification and pyrolysis plants. These are smaller than conventional energy-from-waste plants and do not require a minimum input of waste. This means that they are more flexible in terms of waste input and therefore compatible with plans for waste minimisation.
Compact Power runs the first commercial plant in the UK at Avonmouth in Bristol and there are several other authorities pursuing proposals.
They perform much better against emissions to air and land and, like any small scale plant, are more likely to create jobs for the local community.
Mechanical-biological treatment (MBT) is another alternative that streamlines residual waste to recover maximum economic and environmental value. It avoids putting toxics, recyclables and organics together for final disposal and is already in use in Durham.
Local authorities will need to respond to changing conditions for recycled goods and need to incorporate flexibility for small, local sites in line with the proximity principle.
Authorities need to be able to respond to up-to-date assessments of a county’s needs and be able to take advantage of new, emerging technologies.
We at Forum for the Future – the UK’s leading sustainable development charity – are clear that the solutions to our waste problems are already available.
Whatever happens next, waste is such an emotive issue that trust between authorities and the community is essential to coming up with the best solution through an open, honest transparent process where the community buys into the right technology, in the right location.
Isn’t about time we got waste in hand?
