Stimulating our Waste Infrastructure
SOURCE: CIWM, NOVEMBER 2009
A recent report has highlighted the need to consider the purpose of a potential ban on landfilling certain materials and recommended that, if increased recycling is the goal, the Government should ban the same materials from incineration. This view was echoed by various European environment agencies operating in countries where bans are already in operation.
Arguably, in order to properly reflect the now mandatory waste hierarchy in waste management policy, as required by Article 4 of the revised Waste Framework Directive, the Government would have to complement a ban on landfilling with a ban on incineration, since they both constitute disposal.
However, Article 4 does make clear that, where justified by life-cycle thinking, a departure may be made from the hierarchy. Conceivably, therefore, for certain waste streams incineration could be justified while a landfill ban remained in place, for instance where there is energy generation.
It is clear that for the waste hierarchy to work, and to push materials up the chain, there needs to be innovation in waste treatment technologies. A ban on landfilling of certain materials may stimulate such innovation, but the report also made clear that any proposal must allow time for the necessary infrastructure to collect and process the diverted material to be established, and noted that in this context the collection infrastructure may be just as important as the treatment capacity, particularly when dealing with difficult waste streams such as food waste.
AUTHOR: Vincent Brown
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