The ETS emerged as one of the key talking points across various talks throughout the show. This comes on the back of the government’s announcement in July that it will be extended to cover the energy from waste sector, with estimates it could cost local authorities £700 million a year (see letsrecycle.com story).
During the discussion on day 1 of the show, the panel all agreed that the ETS needs to be set at a rate which enables it to be “self-extinguishing” but also not be overly complicated.
Neil Grundon, the chairman of Grundon Waste Management, said the 2028 timeline for the rollout to the EfW sector provides a good amount of time to get the rollout right.
He said: “I would say 2028 is a fair amount of time to get to grips with this. Essentially we will be looking at anthropogenic carbon emissions and biogenic carbon emissions and coming up with a really, really complicated way of appropriating a tax to one or the other.
“Essentially, we will be using carbon monitors to give us data, which will then be taxed or monetised. We’ve seen what happened with the landfill tax, with the EA dealing with HMRC on water allowances and how the confusion between the EA and HWRC happens and we’ve seen a lot of mistakes there.
“I just hope there is some simplicity in all of this and this hiatus between now and 2028 should give us a bit of time to come up with something sensible.”
‘Simple’
The need for simplicity was also raised Mick Davis, Biffa’s chief operating officer for resources & energy.
He said while the tax needs to be simple, he feels things will change upstream rather than downstream. “Trying to capture carbon after you’ve burnt it is difficult. I think it will be before you get to that stage.
“I do wonder, if capturing EfW at the end is probably too late as it should be resolved before then.”
Carbon
Suez’s chief development office, John Wilkinson, also mentioned more upstream solutions to reduce the impact of the tax.
With costs potentially being passed down to local authorities, the panel shared the view that there will be an increased focus up the waste hierarchy.
Mr Wilkinson said: “I think the easiest way to reduce the carbon is not to produce it in the first place. I can see systems coming into the UK looking at waste minimisations to reduce carbon before we produce it and I think that’s the most important aspect of this.”
We all agree we need to decarbonise
- Mike Maudsley, chief executive of Enfinium
Sleepwalk
Mike Maudsley, chief executive of EfW company Enfinium, warned that the five year run-in to 2028 provides enough time to prepare, but the government can’t “sleepwalk” into this.
He said: “We’ve lived with carbon for the last 30 years in the energy sector, it is not new but new to the waste sector. There are things out there we can copy and follow.
“Ultimately we’ve got to make sure when ETS comes in, it is in the right hierarchy. If we’re still exporting waste or putting it into landfill, it won’t work. It must drive behaviours at the right level, otherwise it just becomes a tax.”
On decarbonisation, he said: “We all agree we need to decarbonise, and we need to get to a point where we have what we have, we can’t do anything else with the waste, and the best place for it is an EfW plant, and if you put carbon capture at these plants you can call them decarbonisation solutions.
“The whole sector could be a decarbonisation plan. Yes, stop creating it in the first place, but once you have it, let’s produce energy, distribute heat, capture carbon and we’ve done our job for everybody.”
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