by Mike Brown
6 minute read
Sometimes it takes a really clear expression of the fundamentals of a point of view to help you see what’s wrong with it. A couple of weekends ago, BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions came to the Gloucester Guildhall. One of the hot local topics is the county council’s incinerator plan, and a number of its opponents were in the audience, and a question was raised about whether it was “a blot on the landscape or a necessary step to securing an ecologically sustainable environment”.
The resulting debate wasn’t especially informed: Jeanette Winterson made some hand-waving remarks about the need for more imaginative solutions, more local consultation and an end to “fancy consultancy firms being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds” (I wish!). Perhaps Defra was listening, as just days later it finally published Energy from Waste: A guide to the debate, which includes advice on how to navigate the consultation and planning processes. Most local authorities that were contemplating an incinerator have of course long since passed these stages of the process. The belated document unfortunately represents a lengthy explanation of how to design a stable door, while the horse is already in someone’s lasagne…
Here be dragons
The response I found most interesting was that of Dragons’ Den star Deborah Meaden, who, acknowledging she knew little about the specific project in Gloucester, posed a question back to the audience: “Does anyone here think it’s a bad idea to take waste and turn it into energy?”
As you might expect from someone whose livelihood depends on spotting the selling point of a proposition, her question acutely picked out the intuition that is driving the enthusiasm for energy from waste. Indeed, a majority of the audience indicated that they favoured the principle but far fewer wanted the local incinerator. Meaden seemed to think, perhaps misled by the mention of a “blot” in the question, that the key issue for residents was the unsightly appearance of the building; and she expressed the view that recycling was problematic because it consumes energy. Perhaps the dragon is not au fait with the large amount of embedded energy within waste, and the environmental benefit of avoiding the need for energy intensive manufacture of products from virgin materials.
But, leaving aside the particular circumstances in Gloucestershire, how can it possibly be a bad idea to take waste and turn it into energy? If you start from the thought that waste is inevitable, that not all waste can be recycled, and that we’re faced with the choice of whether to landfill or incinerate the residue – well, it’s difficult to argue against recovering energy from this remnant.
Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. To start with, there are two interesting problems of definition. First, there’s “waste”. Describing material with this word means we’ve mentally consigned it to disposal, and so it’s quite natural that gaining a bit of electricity from it will seem a good idea. It feels like you’re taking a problem (how do I dispose of this waste?) and turning it into an opportunity (we can meet some of our power needs!)
However, you don’t have to take the view that all material should be regarded as a resource to agree that there is still quite a lot of potentially recyclable or compostable material that ends up in the residual stream. Is it a good idea for this to be turned into energy? Well, not if it is going to be treated in line with the waste hierarchy. Too often, large incinerator projects come with excessive minimum tonnage guarantees that provide local authorities with an incentive to keep collecting as residual waste material that it would be economically practicable to collect separately for recycling.
Efficiency matters – Sheffield’s EfW plant is one of few in the UK that feeds a district heating network. Photo by Talltim, via Wikimedia Commons
The second is about what “turning it into energy” means. Just how much energy, and at what cost? Not all incinerators are the same: there are those whose primary function is disposal, but which generate a bit of energy too; and there are those that are power stations that happen to use waste as a fuel. We used to refer to “Waste to Energy” (WtE), where the emphasis was on providing a waste management solution, but relentless linguistic discipline within the industry now has us talking of “Energy from Waste” (EfW), which conveys the idea of a power plant.
What’s the difference? Well, both are very effective at reducing waste to ash, but an old banger that achieves 20mpg and a modern car that achieves 60mpg are both very effective at turning fuel into CO2. The difference is the amount of benefit that is achieved in the process: the amount of energy delivered for the pollution created.
Dragon their feet
The problem with most UK incinerators is that they aren’t very efficient. A few are able to produce electricity efficiently and make good use of the remaining heat: in Sheffield, it is supplied to 140 buildings connected to a district energy network. This rivals the best plants in places such as the Netherlands, but more often the UK fails the challenge of finding viable uses for heat. Of 68 facilities in UK operating, under construction, or in consenting, just 16% have secured a heat sink. This just isn’t good enough. Some new facilities, such as Viridor’s Trident Park in Cardiff and Peel’s South Clyde Energy Centre in Glasgow, have credible plans to feed heat to local users but this is nowhere near the norm yet.
As Adam Baddeley pointed out in an article last year, UK incinerators only generating electricity are inefficient compared with modern combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) generators. They emit more CO2 per kilojoule of energy produced – and so displacing CCGT with EfW is actually bad news from a climate change perspective.
With this in mind, the question I’d like to pose to Deborah Meaden and her audience in Gloucester is: “Does anyone think it’s a bad idea to take a mix of recyclable, compostable and waste materials and turn it into energy so inefficiently that it produces more CO2 than a gas power station?”
It may lack the elegance of her question, but I think this exposes important hidden assumptions in the discussion around EfW. We need to make sure that as much recyclable and compostable material as possible is taken out of the waste stream before it goes for incineration; and we need to build proper, efficient power stations instead of incinerators.
Unless we achieve that change of focus, then I’m sorry Deborah, but I’m out.
I see you point with large scale incinerators being inefficient. But take into account other industry such as farming where bio security is an issue and transporting large amounts of dead stock to landfill is really a no no for everyone health. This type of incineration starts to make sense, especially so with a heat recovery units.
Interesting comments on commercial behaviours between landfill and other processes, and the impact of the landfill tax increase. For me, another factor is world commodity prices. How is it economic to import wood pellet from USA for power generation, yet a lot of UK construction sector timber waste still goes to landfill, with methane emissions? Some timber is treated (paint, preservative, etc) and not suited for domestic wood-burning stoves (plus urban air quality issues), but high temperature furnaces will break these products down.
Thank you for the comments bringing it back to the true ‘waste heirarchy’where recovery is just above landfill. The enthusiasm for so called waste to energy choice is gaining traction in WA and has some of us seeking caution to thinking this is the preferred option for waste disposal. We need to do the sums on the true cost/benefits of burning these materials or to separate, compost, recycle etc first. With such a high capital outlay, the incinerating beast will need to be fed and the feedstock may not always be the residue.
Mike,
I am not surprised by your argument given your well known views on the topic, but it’s pretty obvious business would never seek to “waste” something they could recycle, the economics dictate the recycling and composting route every time. This simple market dynamic has led to landfill becoming the least used option across most of the UK, whilst growing a sustainable economy.
The reality is that the waste sector has now become a resource recovery sector and is interested to develop sustainable cities and industries to provide new materials, energy and sustainable jobs for the economic stability of the UK, and the record of the past 20 years demonstrates this with public authorities moving from 5% to 40% recycling levels.
What the waste sector delivers is a function of what the local authority clients need and can afford, keeping the lights on and the bath warm.
A pertinent example is the SELCHP facility in London which generates enough electricity for 50,000 homes and is currently laying 5km of pipework to provide heat in the local community, this being a direct result of these long term schemes. In my view, our industry plays a valuable part in the circular economy and EfW is an integral part, we should be proud of that fact.
Gill – 20 years as an operator, where I first met you at the ESA, taught me quite the opposite. Far from business always recycling materials, my experience is that the cheapest legal solution tends to be adopted by the waste industry.
The reason we are landfilling far less waste today than the 95% we did in the 90s has little to do with the market dynamic of recycling per se, and everything to do with a landfill tax at £72/t (in 3 weeks time); a tax that the waste industry lobbied long and hard against. This demonstrates that with the right fiscal stimulus, the waste sector has matured and can play its part in moving towards a resource focussed economy.
Retrofitting CHP to existing incinerators such as SELCHIP is a great example which goes to the heart to my argument – it is wasteful to burn materials and releasing GHGs unless everything has been done to maximise the utilisation of the energy produced, and too many new UK projects fall short.
Mike – whereas I totally agree with you on the need to make the incinerators more energy effecient by making use of the excess heat produced (coming from Denmark, that’s a safe argument for me to make), when it comes to the comparison with high efficient CCGT, I think you are missing something.
We should recycle as much of the waste as possible, no arguement against that (except maybe that recycling has a CO2 foot print as well, and as you attempt to increase the %-age, that foot print can become rather large), but in the end you will have to landfill a fraction and when comparing the energy effeciency you then have to off-set the – much worse – GHG emissions from that landfilled fraction.
Jens – my argument certainly isn’t that landfill is better than incineration (although there are certain circumstances where that can be true), but that recycling is. Beyond that – if we are going to convert materials into GHGs then let’s use, as Denmark generally does, as much of the energy produced as possible.
I see the comparison with CCGT as helpful, because this is the main form of electricity generation capacity at the margin in the UK. If EfW is performing less well on GHG emissions than the marginal form of generating power, I would say that makes it a poor solution, particularly given the significant share of fossil fuel derived plastics in the residual stream. Mike
Hi Peter, I’m sure Mike and I wouldn’t be far apart on most key issues including Mike’s observation that most UK EfW plants are inefficient because they are not hooked up to provide CHP. This is a long term failure of strategic planning policy at a time when LAs have had to make to make tough decisions about where their waste will go when the holes are filled. Hampshire for example aspired to have a Northern European blend of material and energy recovery (when 40%+ recycling rate was a pipedream) but was constrained in planning terms to build on sites of former incinerators (or close to). The post-industrial UK just doesn’t have enough district heating systems / factories to plug into nor will we get concensus – either on the Any Questions panel or across society that the best place to put these “blots on the landscape” might be nearer human activity not further away.
If we ever go down this route it’ll take much higher energy prices (mitigated by fracking?)and another generation will pass. In the meantime the unmarketable waste keeps coming and we need somewhere for it to go…
Mike, your argument is logical – up to a point – and certainly better informed than the panelists around the QT table. I wholeheartedly agree about the need to maximise the movement of stuff up the hierarchy. But your argument bothers me for the same reason the “fracking will solve our energy needs, so why do we need nuclear?” argument. This just assumes that because if you take some gas it will burn cleaner and more effciently in C02 terms than mixed MSW that gas is the better answer for the environment. I am not convinced it is – because gas is a finite resource (reagrdless of how much there turns out to be)and it’s long cycle CO2, whereas the waste will be a mix of short cycle (biofraction) and long cycle (plastics etc). Unmarketable trash needs to go somewhere and most will agree burying it isn’t ideal. We can all rage (and I frequently do) about lack of incentive to create the markets to move stuff around the resource cycle. But to argue that it’s worse than dashing to burn up all the gas we can frack out of this fragile planet neglects a wider view. Steve
Steve, really interesting line of response – but I’m not sure that you and Mike are really that far apart. As I see it, Mike argues that the problem with many UK incinerators is that they aren’t efficient – they’re burning waste and not extracting enough value from it. Better incinerators would enable more energy to be derived from the waste we produce, and therefore lead to a greater reduction in the amount of gas we need to use.
Rather than it being an argument for more use of gas power stations, I see the comparison with the efficiency level of a CCGT as an attempt to set a benchmark that new incinerators should be pushed to meet.