Author information:
Dr Gev Eduljee is technical director at SITA UK. He worked in hazardous waste treatment before spending 15 years as a consultant with ERM. He joined SITA in 2001, with oversight of the permitting, environmental, EMS and heath & safety functions. He has published widely on waste-related issues, especially on incineration and public health risk assessment.
Currently, all incineration activities are classed as Disposal. The matter came to a head in 2003 when the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that incineration of waste in a dedicated unit was Disposal, a judgement that resulted in a hasty amendment of the Packaging Directive to explicitly include “incineration plants with energy recovery” under the definition of recovery.
To clarify the issue in primary waste legislation, the European Commission proposed in its Thematic Strategy on the Prevention and Recycling of Waste (2005) “to start introducing the use of efficiency thresholds to classify waste treatment in municipal incinerators either as recovery or disposal”.
This proposal has been taken up in the ongoing revision of the Waste Framework Directive (WFD), the Commission's legal instrument.
The Commission's proposal has attracted support and opprobrium in equal measure as the draft Directive passes through its various scrutiny stages.
Environmental groups and some Member States have lobbied for incineration to remain a Disposal activity on the grounds that its “principal use” is always disposal, energy generation being an incidental spin-off.
Opposition
The opposing view, expressed by the waste management industry, other Member States and supported collectively by the Environment Committee (the lead committee piloting the revision of the WFD through the European Parliament), is that the ECJ's “principal use” test is insufficiently robust, and that a Recovery criterion based on energy efficiency will, in the words of Commissioner Stavros Dimas, “distinguish between municipal solid waste incinerators that have been built with a specific concern for high energy output from [incinerators] that have been built without such a concern”.
In its first reading of the draft WFD the European Parliament rejected the Commission's proposed energy efficiency thresholds for new and existing plant, in effect reverting to the ECJ's judgement of 2003. However the Council of Ministers reinstated the criteria and calculation formula in its Common Position of June 2007, albeit with some amendments.
The debate might have been less polarised if the Commission had demonstrated how a purely technical efficiency criterion squared with the activity of Recovery, essentially an environmental concept defined in the current draft of the WFD as “any operation provided that its principal result is waste serving a useful purpose by replacing other materials which would otherwise have been used … in the plant or in the wider economy”.
Reviewing the Commission's formula, the environmental consultancy Okopol noted that while the proposed energy efficiency thresholds of 60% and 65% are intended to represent BAT for existing and new plant respectively, no justification is provided as to where the boundary lies between Disposal and Recovery – 50%? 60%? 70%? Okopol's 2004 study into the status of processes other than incineration points out that silver recovery from fixer solution is classed (rightly) as a recovery process although less than 2% by mass of the original waste is actually recovered.
There is a intuitive link between the Commission's proposal and the activity of Recovery, since it is sensible to assume that an incinerator will at some point create a net environmental benefit in terms of displacing primary energy sources (either directly or indirectly) as its energy efficiency rises.
Disposal can be viewed as an activity intended to protect human health and the environment while recovery can be regarded as performing a dual function of preserving primary resources plus protecting the environment.
To demonstrate this link for recovery the Commission's technical approach needs to be coupled with an environmental analysis, typically expressed as a carbon balance, to assess the net effect of this displacement with changing energy efficiency. BAT standards apply whether an incinerator operates in Disposal or Recovery mode.
Although a number of methodological questions have to be resolved, a preliminary environmental assessment of various performance indicators has recently been attempted by Marcel van Berlo of the Dutch company AEB.
Generalising his findings, his assessment suggests that a “conventional” incinerator generating only electricity has an energy efficiency of 50-60% (according to the Commission's formula) and is marginally carbon-negative, while the latest generation of incinerator optimised for electricity production operates at an efficiency rating of 60% and above, and in net terms is carbon-positive.
The offset improves further when heat is also produced. These preliminary findings appear to underpin the thresholds proposed by the Commission.
Most existing incinerators in the UK would be hard-pressed to meet the Commission's Recovery threshold of 60%. New plant can be specifically designed to meet and exceed the proposed efficiency threshold of 65%, and hence can justifiably be classed as a Recovery operation since efficiencies above 60% correlate with a net environmental benefit in terms of fuel substitution.
The issue is more than a play on words. The waste hierarchy recognises energy-from-waste as “recovery”, but only confers this formal designation on pyrolysis, gasification and materials recovery operations, irrespective of their operational efficiency.
The Commission has taken a courageous step in seeking to partially regularise this lacuna by giving “conventional” incineration with energy recovery its due.
While it would be naïve to expect the public to welcome incinerators with open arms merely because of a change in status, it nevertheless represents an important shift in the attitude of policy-makers towards incineration, and hopefully will promote more rational and joined-up waste and energy policies.
It remains to be seen whether the Parliament will again reject the threshold approach in its second reading of the draft WFD in early 2008.
If common ground cannot be found between the Environment Council and the Parliament under the co-decision procedure, it is open to the Parliament to exercise its veto in a third and final reading. Between now and then four Presidencies will take the helm of the EU. This is a battle the waste management industry must not lose.
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