EfW in the UK and modernisation in Portugal

The 2009 ISWA Congress was held in Lisbon between 12-15 October 2009, which was a period blessed by an exceptional heat wave, giving Nordic participants a welcome Indian summer. 

The Congress venue was the Cultural Centre at Belém, downstream from Lisbon on the Tagus estuary, from where many explorers, including Christopher Columbus had set sail in the 15^th and 16^th centuries in order to find new worlds.  Therefore the theme of the Congress, Turning Waste into Ideas was entirely appropriate to our historic setting.

Managing Portugal's Waste

Portugal's waste management system has been transformed over the past 15 years from a position where even properly engineered landfills were rare to the situation now where Portugal possesses the full range of modern resource and energy recovery systems supplemented by high quality landfills.  This has meant huge investment from outside sources, such as the EU, the European Investment Bank (EIB), Portuguese government and municipalities.

In 2008 Portugal generated 5.1m tonnes of MSW an increase of 1.8% per annum between 2001 and 2008.  Selective collection of recyclable wastes amounted to 571,000 tonnes, a 20% increase on the previous year. Nevertheless, according to the EU's recently published statistics for 2007, while at 472kg per capita Portugal generated less MSW than the EU average of 522kg with 85kg per capita recyclables collected (18%) it also recycles less than half the EU average of 39%.

There are 278 municipalities in Portugal, which are now linked together into 29 groups for waste management purposes with 15 multi-municipal systems (MMS) and 14 inter-municipal systems (IMS).  The distinction between the two is that in the former more than 50% of the finance is provided by central government and the IMS systems are controlled only by the municipalities directly. 

In his plenary presentation Luís Fabéa looked at the role of the EGF (Empresa Geral do Fomento), a government sponsored special purpose company operating on a private sector financial model, in the management of MSW in Portugal.  Luís Fabéa stressed that EGF manages 12 of the MMSs covering 168 municipalities, 6.1m people, 50% of Portugal's landmass and 3.5m tpa of MSW.

The gate fee for EGF's waste treatment and disposal facilities is between €20-40 per tonne with an average of €20.55.  This is a very low figure compared to the European average. 

There are three main reasons: 

• Portugal has a lower average wage structure than northern European countries,
• much of the funding for waste infrastructure has been donated by the EU or provided at low interest rates by the EIB, and
• there is no waste or landfill tax. 

Brent Cross reborn

One of the first presentations in the 5 streams of
parallel sessions at the ISWA event was from Andrew Street, managing director of SLR, a
Manchester based environmental consultancy,
who described the Brent Cross/Cricklewood (BXC)
redevelopment. 

This redevelopment covers 167ha of land beyond the southern end of the M1 motorway.  BXC will generate 1.3 million sq m of building development and a new train station on the main line out of St Pancras. 

Included in the project is a waste processing and treatment facility to help London achieve the Mayor's target for 85% waste re-use and recycling within London. 

The old GLC rail transfer station will be demolished and replaced by a state of the art recovery facility for recyclables and energy recovery: first processing the residuals through MBT for a gasification and/or pyrolysis plant located separately from the processing facility and generating 16-18 MW for export to the local grid while also having the potential to also supply heating and cooling services within the BXC area.  The facility will serve the whole of NW London by processing 450,000 tpa of MSW and C&I wastes. 

Mr Street acknowledged that there had been considerable protest about the proposals to include the energy from waste facility but the developers regarded the need to deal with waste within the footprint of the development as an essential obligation.

Innovation at Flanders' CA sites

Liesbet Noé of INTERAFVAL, the specialist waste management part of the association of municipalities in Flanders, in her presentation spoke about the development of a waste stream costing programme for Civic Amenity sites.  This is to enable producer responsibility to be implemented in sites in Flanders.  Producer responsibility in this case incorporates not only the recharging of EEE producers for WEEE delivered to each of the sites but also for people delivering non-sorted waste, garden waste and construction and demolition (C&D) waste.

In Flanders currently 72% of household waste is collected for recycling.  The region's CA sites also have increased their recycling rate mainly through diversifying the number of waste streams which are segregated, up from 8 waste streams in 1985 to 30 now.  Flanders has on average one CA site for every 18,000 people, much better than the average in all parts of the UK.

The municipalities wanted to determine how much these sites cost to run, including the initial construction and other set up costs.  Therefore the costs of the concrete, the signage, containers and staff accommodation are amortised to give an annual cost.  All the sites are staffed using the municipalities own staff. 

The annual management costs are also calculated and in addition estimates made of the costs, mainly staff, transport and treatment dealing with the individual waste streams.  These three elements can then be utilised to provide a cost per kg for each of the waste streams handled at each site.

There is now a dedicated web-site which has been developed to enable each of the municipalities to enter their raw data and to calculate the cost of handling waste streams.  This is important for WEEE because the producers are responsible for paying for the costs of collection from each site and these costs are split between the capital costs at an average of €9,000 per site and running costs at €100 per tonne. 

Liesbet Noé noted that the WEEE was taken away without any allowance for the materials value. That aspect was for negotiation between the EEE producers and the WEEE processors and reprocessors. 

The municipalities make differential charges for people delivering unsorted wastes, garden waste and C&D waste (http://www.vvsg.be/).  For the UK this would be an option in order to reduce waste generation, encourage more home composting and raise our recycling levels in CA sites.  In addition, the true costs of WEEE segregation could be paid back to the waste disposal authorities.

In response to a question about the admission of small commercial waste generators to the sites, Liesbet Noé stated that it was a decision for individual municipalities and only a minority choose to do so.

Scandinavia and paper

Johan de Greef of Keppel Seghers, the specialist energy consultancy, examined WtE as a flexible source of renewable energy for sustainable production in the Scandinavian paper industry.  Nordic Paper had to replace its old fuel oil boilers which provided process steam for its paper mill.

The new system had to provide a fast response to fluctuating steam demand for the paper mill and also all the electrical power requirements for the plant plus a contribution towards the local district heating system.  None the less Nordic decided that there were sufficient financial advantages for the company to opt for a CHP plant powered by residual household waste.

The new boiler had to be fitted into a very tight space so it was built vertically.  Also because there was a need to provide for large fluctuations in heat demand at short notice in the plant there was increased expense to provide for a pressurised hot water system that could provide the feedstock for the steam supply system.  Nordic Paper found that the change was very cost effective, mainly due to the fact there was a gate fee for the residual household waste coming into the plant and the sales of heat to the district heating scheme.  Therefore Nordic Paper energy costs have been reduced from €6.1m outlay each year to an annual income of €1.8m per annum

Zero Waste

A special session was devoted to the zero waste concept, co-incidentally held on the same day that Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary was setting out his plans to make the UK a zero waste nation.

Dr C M (Kees) Plug from the Netherlands Sustainable Production Directorate, formerly the waste management directorate, of the Ministry of the Environment tackled waste treatment to materials management.  The Netherlands has now progressed so far in treating its waste that moving onto waste prevention through supply chain management, squeezing waste out of production system at their beginnings.

Later in a keynote address Dr Plug noted that the Netherlands has now reached an 83% recovery level as shown in the table below:

Dr Plug stated that the Netherlands was examining: pilot schemes, priority waste streams and appropriate instruments in order to limit waste generation.  The pilot schemes included gypsum, zinc, carpets, textiles, EPS (expanded polystyrene) and food waste.  There would be at least a further 15 projects developed over the next year.  The priority waste streams were being identified through their environmental inputs.  It is expected that there will be environmental gains of 20% by 2015.  As for the adapting and development of new environmental management instruments there has not been much progress so far.

The NetherlandsParliament has just adopted its draft second National Waste Management Plan but Dr Plug wants this to be the last and the next to be a Materials Management Plan.

Zero Waste

Jeff Cooper followed by explaining that waste was essential for the proper functioning of any organism.  By extension waste would be therefore being a necessary part of the normal functioning of organisations as well.  What mattered was to ensure that any waste that were generated were reutilised in the most productive way.

Jeff Cooper went onto talk about zero waste in waste planning and specifically Scotland's draft waste plan and one of the pharmaceutical company SmithKlineGlaxo's production facilities and their adoption of zero waste to landfill.  However, following on from the Netherlands' position it was quite embarrassing to state that even by 2025 the draft waste management plan envisaged that Scotland would be sending up to 5% of its waste to landfill and that this was dependent on the country recycling 70% or more of its waste by the same date.  Also Germany in 2007 claimed only 1% of its MSW was going to landfill.

With the description of SmithKlineGlaxo plant it was a rather better example with the Coleford, Gloucestershire soft drinks plant adopting a zero waste to landfill policy in early 2008.  The Coleford plant sent only 250 tonnes of waste to landfill from its waste generation of nearly 10,000 tonnes in 2008 and in 2009 is on track to meet its zero waste target.  The SmithKlineGlaxo team identified several waste streams for re-use, including cardboard boxes and finding several new recycling options for several others, including glassine, a backing paper for labels, now being reprocessed for inclusion in tissue manufacture.

The Coleford plant's achievement was recognised at the recent letsrecycle.com awards for Excellence in recycling and waste management winning the Commercial Recycling Champion award.

The participants agreed that zero waste was purely a political concept not one that could be used by scientists and engineers.  However, waste prevention is of growing and greater significance for waste managers and presents all of us with an enormous challenge for the future of waste management.

ISWA Award for Scotland

As part of the Congress opening ceremony the ISWA Communication Award 2009 was presented to the “Waste Aware Scotland Recycling Campaign”.  The jury found that overall the communications campaign run by Waste Aware Scotland to enhance the recovery of waste from households and therefore to meet national recycling targets was the best of the four nominations put forward for the ISWA Communications award in 2009. 

The members of the judging panel were impressed by several aspects of the communications campaign, including:

• Piloting of the campaign
• The buy-in from stakeholders, especially food manufacturers and retailers
• The range of presentation materials
• Linking local municipalities into a national campaign
• The extensive evaluation of the results.

The judging panel therefore felt that this campaign could act as an exemplar for other organisations seeking to raise awareness of the considerable range of products and materials which households could place in recycling bins.