The Opposition amendment, agreed by the House of Lords in the third reading of the Bill (see letsrecycle.com story) , stipulated that when composting catering waste it should be heated to 98 deg C for two hours to prevent the spread of diseases like foot-and-mouth.
However, the micro-organisms essential to composting would also be killed by this method of sterilisation and the entire process would be delayed or halted.
Mary Messer, spokeswoman for the Composting Association, said that after the heat treatment the compost would become susceptible to pathogens such as salmonella, defeating the whole point of the treatment. “You don’t have to go to those temperatures to kill pathogens,” she said, “The risk of pathogens in compost is already well covered by the Animal By-Products Order.”
The Animal By-Products Order, which comes into force on May 1, 2003, has been designed to deal with the spread of animal disease by food waste. It is likely to require catering waste in a closed reactor to be heated to 60 deg C for two days or 70 deg C for one hour, depending on the particle size.
The Order will bring the UK into line with EU standards for animal by-products and lift the current UK ban on composting catering waste. In terms of disposal it allows for their treatment at approved composting facilities. If the amendment to the WET bill is kept, it will override the Animal By-Product legislation.
“Nonsense”
Ms Messer said: “One of the reasons for reducing the amount of biodegradable waste going to landfill is to reduce the amount of methane generated. Processing catering waste at 98 deg C unnecessarily uses energy which gives rise to greenhouse gas emissions that affect climate change.” She described this as making a “nonsense of the composting process” as “these two would tend to cancel each other out to a greater or lesser degree.”
Ms Messer added:
“Treating catering waste at 98 deg C would kill off the beneficial organisms used in the composting process. This treatment would make the treated product more susceptible to infection by pathogens such as salmonella.”
Nick McAllister, co-ordinator for the Community Composting Network, said the amendment showed a “disregard to the biological process”, and meant otherwise compostable material might be dumped in landfills or incinerated.
Mr McAllister said: “I am concerned about the amendment. It is more than adequate to cover animal health but would be detrimental to the composting industry which is vital to sustainable waste management.” He added: “Thermophilic and Mesophilic micro-organisms, essential for the composting process to produce a high quality compost product, would be killed at this temperature.”
Risk
Lord Dixon Smith, Conservative, pushed the amendment through in the House of Lords. During the parliamentary debate he argued: “The difficulty is that before the foot and mouth outbreak a risk assessment would have suggested that it could not happen, but it did… Catering waste is not to be sent for composting and the use of such compost is to be banned on pasture. That is fine, but what if it is used on adjacent arable land and cattle stray on to that land, who can say what will happen?”
There has been a ban on the composting of catering waste in the UK since 2001.
The WET bill has now passed from the House of Lords to the House of Commons, where the compost industry is hoping the contested amendment will be removed. This would seem likely as Lord Whitty has already argued that the amendment is unnecessary.
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