Utilising waste as a resource

We all produce waste, in every area of our lives: ‘food’ waste, ‘plastic’ waste, ‘paper’ waste, even ‘fashion’ waste[1] – a problem which has to be dealt with by someone else.

What if we stopped regarding our waste as a problem and looked on it as a valuable resource that should not be wasted? ^[2]

The Waste Hierarchy challenges us to ‘reduce, reuse, recycle and recover’ so that less goes to landfill.  Published figures claim that recycling is greatly increasing but they do not tell the complete story and a large proportion of what we claim is ‘recycled’ is actually exported to other countries for them to deal with; material which is not exported can even end up in landfill!^[3]

Imagine a community that gathers its own surplus items, segregates them into resources to be re-used, or genuinely recycles them, i.e. turns them into different products, and converts the rest into the heat, transport and electrical energy that the community needs. 

An unattainable Utopia?  In many of our neighbouring countries, Denmark and Germany for instance, this already happens and has done for many years. Whereas UK legislation regards recycling, Energy from Waste (EfW) and landfilling as different issues which must be kept separate, our European neighbours take an integrated approach, viewing their ‘residual waste’ as a valuable energy resource and using it to heat their homes, power their industries, and even fuel their vehicles. As a result, thermal efficiency of a Danish EfW plant will be >90%, compared with <25% in a typical UK plant. Furthermore, the Danes use only a sustainable, otherwise-wasted, fuel, while we must make up the balance largely using fossil-fuels.

Clearly a change of mindset is needed. Not all ‘waste’ is ‘recyclable’, in the proper sense of the word, and ‘recycling what we can’ often uses a great deal of energy, with limited markets for the resultant products.  Landfilling is merely an endorsement of wastefulness.  On the other hand, our nation is crying out for sustainable energy supplies.

Key to a successful EfW plant is to utilise the co-generated heat (which is produced anyway!) for space- or process-heating^[4]  In the absence of many district heating schemes in the UK, the best way to utilise the heat energy is to co-locate an energy-intensive industrial/manufacturing plant on the EfW site, drastically reducing the fossil-fuel requirement.  This not only energises the community, it creates employment and economic opportunity.  Everyone wins!

[1]www.imeche.org/policy-and-press/reports/detail/engineering-out-fashion-waste

[2] www.imeche.org/policy-and-press/reports/detail/waste-as-a-resource