Energy from Waste (EfW) is very well established overseas, but in Australia it has yet to get off the ground. The reasons for this are to be found in a complex combination of different historical factors: adequate landfill capacity, poor financial incentives, unfavourable public perceptions and lack of government policy support. While these are changing, they have combined in the past to prevent any meaningful EfW projects from gaining traction. But the position is changing.
O
ver 10 years ago, the federal government provided financial support to the Waste Management Association of Australia to develop an ‘EfW Sustainability Guide’,
which was finalised in 2005. The document was the result of extensive nationwide consultation and represented a starting point to put EfW back on the agenda by outlining some basic principles and a process for assessing EfW proposals, such as: • Does recovering energy from the proposed fuel represent the best use of that material
Energy from Waste in Australia is there a future? Dr Ron Wainberg, Technical Director, MRA Consulting Group
at that place and time? • Is the process efficient? • Will environmental outcomes be controlled? • What will be the social outcomes? • Are controls in place to ensure the stated outcomes will be achieved? • Will the project work financially? These questions are largely common sense, but they needed to be clearly stated because at the time EfW was a no-go zone in Australia. Given the slow progress since then, it is easy to conclude that these efforts may have been forgotten. To be fair, Australia does recover some energy from its waste. As shown in Figure 1, there are over 60 installations feeding electricity derived from waste into the national grid[1]. However, the majority of these systems (which exclude anaerobic digestion systems) are based on the combustion of landfill gas and bagasse, a by-product of sugar production. The potential to recover energy from the bulk urban solid waste stream is largely ignored. The scale is small too. Table 1[2] shows the nameplate generating capacity of the
8 Sustainability Matters - Apr/May 2016
www.SustainabilityMatters.net.au