With the recent publication of Enva’s sustainability report, Circular Online caught up with its CEO, Tom Walsh, to discuss sustainable supply chains, net zero and its digital transformation.
CO: In Enva’s sustainability report, you’ve outlined three milestone commitments. Can you explain what these are and why they’re areas of focus?
TW: Our first milestone commitment is to improve our net carbon impact by 2025 to a point where we are saving 15 times more carbon than we produce in our own operations (we’re currently at 10 times). Our ability to cut carbon and positively influence climate change is arguably our principal reason for being. This headline commitment keeps all facets of our business focused on that goal.
Digital innovation is enabling us to quickly build a more detailed understanding of our customers’ waste flows together with their issues and the opportunities to support them
Our second commitment is to increase the percentage of our revenue that is generated by the sale of recovered materials and products to 50% by 2025. We recognise that, over time, ‘waste’ generation and the need to manage waste is going to become less relevant; the real challenge will be in delivering better recovery outcomes and high-quality waste-derived products and commodities.
Continued technological innovation is clearly vital in increasing the range of materials and products that we can recover and underpins our third commitment to bring one significant, innovative resource recovery solution to market each year for the next decade.
CO: You mention your digital transformation programme. What has this entailed and what impact has this had on the sustainability of the business?
TW: We have invested over £6m in a single, scalable infrastructure and application landscape.
This has dramatically improved the efficiency of our processes and streamlined our operational relationships with our customers enabling our teams to be more productive and spend more time delivering recovery solutions.
Digital innovation is enabling us to quickly build a more detailed understanding of our customers’ waste flows together with their issues and the opportunities to support them.
This, in turn, leads to better engagement and more sustainable solutions. Integrating the data we collect also allows us to understand patterns across our diverse customer base and proactively adapt our services to better meet their needs.
CO: Sustainable supply chains are highlighted as being one of the sectors’ goals. What does Enva see as being the major barriers to sustainable supply chains and what needs to happen for these to be overcome?
TW: A fundamental barrier to closed-loop recycling lies in product and packaging design and, more specifically, the need to avoid unnecessary mixing of incompatible waste types at the point of disposal.
The waste and recycling sector needs to find ways to work more closely with the entire supply chain so the development of a more circular economy is seen as a common challenge and not simply a post-manufacture or post-consumer issue.
A key impediment to the development of sustainable supply chains is that the cost of sustainable waste management is still not generally borne by the manufacturer. While the concept of Producer Responsibility (and contribution to waste recovery costs) for certain waste streams such as packaging are established, they are not sufficiently widespread, nor do they reflect the full costs of recovery. We very much welcome and support policy direction in the UK that seeks to address this issue.
The lack of regulatory capacity in the UK and Ireland waste and recycling sector is also significantly limiting our ability to combat climate change. We are experiencing severe delays in determining end of waste applications and as a result, material is needlessly being sent to landfill where its commercial and environmental value is lost forever.
The pandemic has demonstrated that we can take quick and safe regulatory decisions when needed and this must be sustained to help meet the most pressing challenge of our time.
Consideration should be given to breaking out the vital day-to-day compliance role of the waste regulators (EA, SEPA, NIEA, EPA) from other responsibilities. We also believe there may be an appetite for businesses to offer additional funding to increase regulatory capacity to address these bottlenecks.
CO: There is a lot of talk about how the resources sector can contribute to net zero and how, as a sector, businesses need to reduce their own carbon impact. Can you outline Enva’s work in this area?
TW: Our core business is focused on waste reduction and the recovery of valuable resources, both of which have clear and significant CO2 benefits.
We are, however, equally committed to minimising the CO2 footprint from our own operations and those of our supply chain. Examples of this include replacing gas oil use on generators with Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil (HVO), introducing more electric company cars and reviewing electric/sustainable fuel options on our HGV fleet and using the latest applied technology to improve the routing of our collection vehicles. We are currently reviewing several additional measures for implementation in 2022.
CO: The report states that Enva is responsible for saving 10 times more CO2 through displacement than it generates through its operations. Can you explain what this means and what the greater implications of this are?
TW: In 2021, 346,000 tonnes of CO2 were avoided through the replacement of primary or virgin material without waste-derived materials in the production of glass, plastic, marine fuels, fertilisers and other materials; the total collection, processing and administration of our overall operations generated 34,000 tonnes. As a result, our net carbon saving through the sustainable management of our customers’ waste is 10 times greater than the amount of carbon produced by our own operations.
CO: A large part of the report looks at how Enva is investing in innovation. Can you explain a bit about the work in this area?
TW: The inclusion of innovation in our milestone commitments demonstrates how vital we believe this to be for the continued growth of our businesses and the wider waste and recycling industry. We must find ways to support and fund this work across the sector recognising that much of the R&D and pioneering innovation takes place in smaller niche businesses who need help to advance and scale-up these solutions.
The challenge for our sector is understanding when EfW shifts from being a positive alternative to becoming an acceptable second-best recourse and therefore an impediment to recovery over time
Examples of recent innovation by Enva include a unique treatment for incinerator ash that produces a sand like material which is then combined with other aggregates, cement and water to create concrete products. This saves 200-300 kg of virgin materials per tonne of concrete manufactured.
CO: What are Enva’s plans regarding waste to energy in the context of carbon reduction?
TW: Enva is focused on deploying capital into recovery solutions but we recognise the role that energy conversion has to play in extracting value from waste which cannot technically or commercially be recycled.
In these instances, we will work with carefully selected energy partners to offset the use of fossil fuels. As an example, Enva will supply a large proportion of the fuel for the Oldhall Recovery Project in Scotland, the first energy from waste recovery plant in Scotland that is being developed without recourse to public funding or waste commitments.
The challenge for our sector is understanding when EfW shifts from being a positive alternative to becoming an acceptable second-best recourse and therefore an impediment to recovery over time. Regulators need to be tuned in to this dynamic and act in the same manner that that saw landfill’s easy economics being addressed with Landfill Tax to support more ambitious recovery outcomes.
CO: Looking ahead to 2022, where does Enva see as some of the biggest impacts to the sector next year?
TW: We expect to see increasing demand for recovered materials in consumer products as brands and manufacturers respond to their own ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) targets, consumer ’demand’ and legislative obligation. Enva is well placed to support the sustainable supply chains required to deliver this transition and is committed to cross-sector working to realise this opportunity.
Escalating energy costs as a feature of energy transition mean we, as an industry, must remain focused on cutting wastage and optimising efficiency in our transport and processing operations.
There will undoubtedly be some challenges: not least competition for the key skills required to support the growth of the sector – an issue that we believe will extend well beyond the pandemic. Our industry must be clearer on its compelling role and vital purpose if we are to continue to attract the high end technical, scientific and engineering skills needed to extend the boundaries of resource recovery.
Escalating energy costs as a feature of energy transition mean we, as an industry, must remain focused on cutting wastage and optimising efficiency in our transport and processing operations.
We must also monitor and be fully aware of the growing EfW capacity in the UK to ensure it doesn’t become the easy option and impact more heavily on recovery rates from general waste.
