RDF Conference 2024: Key Points
The RDF Conference 2024, held on 28th November 2024 at the Congress Centre, London, highlighted a transformative era for the waste management sector, where challenges spark innovation and opportunities for sustainable growth. By embracing circularity, technology, and collaboration, the industry can lead the way to a decarbonised and resource-secure future.
Decarbonisation: Decarbonisation is key, quite rightly, and regarded as an urgent priority in the EU and UK. If non-recyclable residual waste, especially biogenic waste, is diverted from landfill to Waste to Energy (WtE), this would dramatically reduce the volume of methane that would otherwise be produced, giving a significant fall in CO2e. In so doing, WtE can play a vital role in the decarbonisation ambition. Nonetheless, coherence is needed if decarbonisation is to be achieved.
Legislation: With over 20 upcoming regulatory changes (e.g. Simpler Recycling, Extended Producer Responsibility (Packaging), Deposit Return Scheme, Emissions Trading Scheme etc), the waste management sector is facing a potential tsunami of directives, guidelines, recommendations and obligations. This will place a cumbersome compliance burden on waste management companies – might this be too much for smaller operators?
RDF Market: Waste volumes are rising. With the storage facilities of overseas facilities typically full, a mild winter will lead to a tight RDF export market in 2025. Gate fees are likely to increase, both abroad and in the UK. The 20% uplift in landfill tax gate fee will have a significant impact on the amount of waste technically available for WtE, but does the capacity exist to receive and treat it?
Plastics: Dirty plastics are something of a ‘problem child’. Emerging solutions such as chemical recycling or biotechnology may offer possible options, but are they scalable and viable? Likewise, Sustainable Aviation Fuels might be the answer, but this is yet unproven, and the market is haunted by the ghosts of previous technologies that promised much but failed to deliver when faced with the sheer heterogeneity of residual waste. We are seeing that in the UK at the moment with gasification facilities. An unresolved question was that of whether the concerted effort to remove plastic from waste-derived fuel risks reducing the calorific value of the resultant material below the point of viable usefulness.
Heat Networks: WtE facilities that are integrated into district heat networks offer significant benefits compared to standalone electricity-only sites. Unfortunately, most UK WtE facilities are not linked to heat networks, there being comparatively few district heat networks in the UK; thus UK WtE sites are generally at a disadvantage compared to their European counterparts, both environmentally and, being less efficient, commercially as well. This disparity may incentivise higher RDF exports to countries with more efficient and integrated processes.
Carbon Taxes: With the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) set to be implemented in the UK and EU by the end of the decade, this will place a cost burden on the EfW sector, with financial and operational implications. Uncertainty about how these changes will be implemented is not helpful, charging mechanisms are likely to be complicated and potentially controversial, given the difficulty of measuring the amount of fossil carbon in heterogeneous waste with any degree of accuracy. Furthermore, in the EU, some nations have already applied carbon taxes at a national level, and the indications are that these levies will persist even with the additional ETS obligations. There could therefore be potential conflicts between national levies and EU-wide ETS schemes, as well as disparities between nations.
In Summary: Increasing waste volumes, varying energy prices and evolving regulatory landscapes are reshaping the RDF and EfW markets. Rising landfill taxes and constrained domestic capacities make exports and facility expansions viable, though challenges like processing costs for dirty plastics and uncertainties in gasification and SAF highlight the need for strategic adaptation.