FCC Environment’s Paul Taylor says we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to deliver a revolution in our sector, and why solving the UK’s waste and resource infrastructure capacity gap could help keep the UK’s lights on…
Let’s face it, we have reached a critical point in the UK’s recycling debate.
Recent developments – not least events in China relating to banning imports of low-grade waste from the UK – have shone a light on a reality we, in the industry, have long been aware of: we rely too heavily on other countries to plug our capacity problem.
You may be familiar with the idea of a ‘capacity gap’ in the UK, which refers, quite simply, to a lack of Energy from Waste (EfW) plants in the UK. Some argue that the UK has more EfW plants than it needs, but I’d like to be quite clear: we do have a capacity gap in the UK and we don’t currently have the appropriate infrastructure in place to deal with it.
The simple reality is that we aren’t getting facilities built quickly enough to process our waste. If we look at EfW for a moment, the approval rate for projects submitted for planning since 1990 is a meagre 63%. It takes an average of 14 months for a project to gain planning permission, which is far longer than the statutory target of 13 weeks taken to decide on applications for major developments. This is chronically slow, and is having the knock-on effect of deterring investment in our domestic waste infrastructure.
The UK urgently needs home-grown infrastructure solutions geared towards high-efficiency energy technologies to help our country keep its lights on.
In 2015, a report by the Green Investment Bank, which looked at the best ways to modernise and improve UK urban infrastructure, highlighted Energy from Waste as a top ten vital renewable technology for smart cities. However, while the UK population is broadly supportive of EfW as a technology, we know that not many people actually want facilities to be built in their local area.
In northern continental Europe – Scandinavia and Germany in particular – EfW plays a crucial role in powering homes and businesses and many of their plants have been incorporated into city centres. The UK’s lack of a viable energy recovery market, on the other hand, means that we are unable to make the best use of our resources. It has also meant that we have even resorted to shipping our waste to other counties for them to process.
In fact, a recent Policy Exchange report found that UK waste management companies have spent more than £900 million in the past five years exporting waste abroad, where it was used to produce energy. In other words, the UK is not only relinquishing its waste to other countries who are able to use it for heat and energy, but it is also paying for the luxury. This is simply not a sustainable model.
The UK urgently needs home-grown infrastructure solutions geared towards high-efficiency energy technologies to help our country keep its lights on. We are ready to tackle this issue, but what is currently lacking is clear policy direction which allow the necessary capital investments to be made.
Developing the right infrastructure to process waste for reuse here in the UK is the kind of game-changing approach we at FCC Environment fully support. I believe we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to deliver a revolution in our sector. If we get it right now, we can support the Government’s ambitions to make the UK a world leader in resource efficiency, while developing an innovative manufacturing base that supports jobs and growth.
