DECC explains how carbon budgets for waste will be implemented

Speaking at a London Remade event yesterday (October 5) entitled ‘Meeting our Carbon Commitments – administrative and financial burden or opportunity for change', DECC's agriculture and waste relationships manager Alexia Davison explained that, under the Plan, 4% of emissions savings in the period 2018-22 were expected to come from the farming, land and waste sectors.

And, she confirmed that, as the lead department for waste, Defra would be publishing how it intended to achieve emissions reductions as part of a departmental Carbon Reduction Delivery Plan in Spring 2010.

Before then, Ms Davison said that all the departments with a responsibility for waste – including Defra, DECC, BIS, CLG and DfT – would be setting up a sector working group to decide how to achieve reductions in emissions and would shape policy while liaising with stakeholders and delivery partners. The group would also develop a set of indicators by which progress could be monitored, she explained.

According to the Low Carbon Transition Plan (see letsrecycle.com story), carbon reduction plans for waste are likely to include tighter controls on emissions from landfill sites – which the Environment Agency is already looking into – more support for waste to energy such as anaerobic digestion and reductions in the amount of waste which is disposed of and sent to landfill through instruments such as increasing Landfill Tax.

It is envisaged that, together, these measures should lead to savings of 1MT of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2020.

Ms Davison said: “Lead departments will include an overview of the sector in their plan, which will be Defra for waste. Individual departmental carbon reduction delivery plans will be published in spring 2010.”

Responding to concerns that the plan might favour energy recovery over reuse, she added: “Certainly there are balances we have to make and my colleagues at Defra would say reduce and reuse is important and that waste to energy is the last in the line.”

ESA

Also at the event, Dirk Hazell, chief executive of the Environmental Services Association (ESA), explained the work that the Association was doing in developing a metric to measure the carbon footprint of waste management activities – an area which he described as “complex”.

He said that, between 1990 and 2006, the sector's emissions fell by 58%, but that more needed to be done – especially because commercial customers wanted to know the carbon footprint of the waste they produced.

As a result, he explained that the ESA had developed its own system of carbon reporting for its members based on the waste sector protocol of the French organisation Enterprises pour L'Environnement, in collaboration with some of its members – notably Veolia and SITA UK – which he said he hoped would become the industry standard and be built into contracts.

He said: “We expect it will receive the endorsement of FEAD and go on to create an international standard for reporting emissions across all waste management.”

Mr Hazell added there was a feeling in the waste sector that the Environment Agency's WRATE – Waste and Resources Assessment Tool for the Environment – which is already used by local authorities to procure new waste contracts and take into account emissions, was “inappropriate” for some decision-making because some of the default settings were too generic.

London Remade

Daniel Silverstone, chief executive of London Remade, also spoke at the event about the Copenhagen talks in December where it is hoped that global leaders will reach a new agreement on climate change which will be a successor to Kyoto – and highlighted the importance of tackling the issue with regards to waste.

He said: “While the global impacts of waste management account for 3% of carbon emissions globally and in the UK 4% of GHG emissions are traced to methane emissions none of this takes into account the carbon impact of logistics, supply chain, manufacturing process and the global trading of recyclables.”