Pre-treatment: Dr Gev Eduljee, SITA UKs technical director

On 30th October the pre-treatment requirement will come into force. Gev Eduljee discusses the impact of the requirement for the industry and the role of landfill tax

Article 6(a) of the Landfill Directive states that “only waste that has been subject to treatment  [shall be] landfilled”, a requirement that applied to the deposit of hazardous waste from 16 July 2004, and which will now be extended to all wastes destined for landfill (with some exceptions) from 30 October 2007.

From this date landfill operators can only deposit waste that has undergone a “treatment” process that passes the Environment Agency's so-called three-point test.

In contrast to the intense discussions surrounding the introduction of other aspects of the Landfill Directive (waste acceptance criteria, landfill bans, diversion of biodegradable municipal waste) with dire warnings of lack of treatment capacity and ultimately of market failure, Regulation 10 of the Landfill (England and Wales) Regulations 2002, enacting Article 6(a), appears to have crept up on the UK with remarkably little fanfare.

 Are there hidden dangers, or are we right to be relaxed?

In keeping with the rest of the Landfill Directive, Article 6(a) is essentially of Northern European provenance, where Member States ban the landfilling of wastes with biological activity and intrinsic energy above set de minimis limits. These restrictions apply to all wastes irrespective of their origin, and compliance is impossible without some form of pre-treatment – mechanical, biological or thermal.

 Typically, this pre-treatment is applied to residual waste following source-separation of recyclables, the latter being another requirement generally stipulated by regulation. In these Member States, pre-treatment under Article 6(a) is integral to, indeed synonymous with landfilling, and has been so since the early 1990s.

With these powerful regulatory drivers either absent or uncoordinated in the UK, “treatment” takes on a different meaning to that in Germany, the Netherlands or Sweden. For example, because the UK sets no limit on the biological activity of landfilled wastes, it is possible to landfill biodegradable municipal waste that has been “treated” only to the extent of partially removing selected recyclates.

No restrictions of any sort apply to the landfilling of biodegradable commercial/industrial (C&I) waste. Upstream, different rules apply to municipal as opposed to C&I waste – household waste is subject to recycling targets with source separation mandated from 2010, but no such requirements apply to C&I waste.

 All this makes landfill pre-treatment in the UK a far more slippery concept to codify because the three-point test cannot be applied consistently across municipal and C&I wastes, nor is the test anchored to quality criteria that define the acceptability of non-hazardous waste dispatched to landfill.

The regulator is left with little option but to introduce Regulation 10 with as little disruption to waste management practices as possible. A glance at the Environment Agency's suite of guidance notes published in late 2006 and 2007 suggests this to be the case – indeed their substance is little changed from the Government's interpretive text published in November 2005.

Other than talking in generalities about various treatment routes and offering fatuous advice to landfill operators (“consider the business opportunities for you to become involved in treating wastes before you landfill them” – the Environment Agency clearly believes the waste sector cannot see beyond the end of its nose) there is little by way of technical guidance that addresses the extent to which treatment should be applied to a waste prior to landfilling.

An entire swathe of waste – from the municipal sector – is deemed to be exempt from Regulation 10. Policing Regulation 10 is also made more difficult by placing the legal responsibility for compliance onto landfill operators instead of amending the duty of care on waste producers.

While UK plc should commend the Environment Agency for intending to take “a reasonable and proportionate approach” and not “[seek] out minor technical breaches at individual facilities”, the fact remains that Government has missed a trick to take waste management to a new level.

 This is especially true of the C&I sector, where the sole policy instrument driving landfill diversion remains the landfill tax, at best a blunt instrument since the price signal has to be fairly dramatic before waste producers accept new practices which are inevitably accompanied by higher prices.

 Until landfill tax escalates to punitive levels it remains to be seen whether increases in collection and treatment cost incurred through Regulation 10 are recoverable via price increases to customers, given that the uneven competitive playing field arising from the wide interpretation of what constitutes “treatment” would tend to lower the sophistication of the average service offer.

Future

Elements of a more robust policy framework have been discussed in the recent Waste Strategy 2007, with promises of consultations on landfill restrictions and other policy instruments applied to the municipal, and especially to the C&I sector. Until this underpinning is in place and operates coherently across all sectors, just as it does in Northern Europe, Regulation 10 will essentially elicit a business-as-usual response.

Therefore in the short term Regulation 10 is unlikely to have as dramatic an impact on “[increasing] waste recycling and recovery” as the Government might have hoped. However, another factor has recently come into play.

Ironically, after years of complaining that plentiful (hence cheap) landfill capacity was undermining the drive towards greater resource efficiency, a recent survey by BDS Marketing Research has now warned that landfill void is being replenished at a rate well below market demand, such that the UK could soon be faced with a shortage of landfill space.

Significant gate fee differentials have indeed opened up between regions of low void capacity (the South East) and regions with ample capacity (West Midlands). At least regionally, it will be the law of supply and demand, and not Regulation 10, that hastens the pace of change by making recycling even more financially attractive to waste producers, than landfilling, landfill tax notwithstanding.