It is a fact that many plastic packs are not recyclable either because they are tainted by the products they contained – this may be raw meat, fish, oil or garden chemicals – or because they are so lightweight. So it would simply not be viable, nor indeed a healthy option, to attempt to recycle some everyday plastic packaging.
Plastic has more calorific value than coal or wood, and yet it is an irony that as a nation we burn coal every day to generate power and bury our waste plastic
And if we look at the consumption of the domestic waste stream – which is itself only a small portion of all waste – plastic still forms a very small percentage: plastic films 3% and denser plastic 4%. All this compared with, for example, kitchen waste which is 17% of our dustbin.
But where it is not possible to re-use or recycle plastic packaging – recovery from energy from waste is not only feasible, it is a good fourth option in the waste hierarchy. Plastic has more calorific value than coal or wood, and yet it is an irony that as a nation we burn coal every day to generate power and bury our waste plastic. This is an enormous waste of energy and one which we are finally moving towards correcting, as landfill space in the UK runs out.
We should think of plastic simply as a “borrowed resource”. For example, a single plastic bottle or food tray has the latent energy to provide enough power to light a 60 watt light-bulb for one and a half hours if burned in a modern energy-from-waste plant – as indeed they do in other European countries.
Another important energy recovery route lies in the production of waste-derived fuel – a valuable energy resource for use in industrial and manufacturing processes such as cement kilns and district heating plants.
Energy from waste is accepted and proven throughout Europe for capturing the energy content of waste and replacing fossil fuels. It also reduces the creation of CO2 and Methane and reduces waste volume going to landfill.
Yet the UK lags well behind many others across Europe in using this route to beneficial recovery of domestic waste. And the inclusion of plastic in the mix of waste is of great importance in generating power efficiently. By example, the Swedish city of Malmo is able to recover energy from its municipal waste to provide the entire population with electricity for 11 out of every 12 months.
So we should not be afraid to embrace this clean-burn technology and the UK government has now stated that energy from waste is set to triple by 2020. Clean and safe energy from waste could utimately provide hundreds of thousands of homes with the benefit of energy.
As Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, has said: “Energy recovery provides a considerable climate change benefit compared to the alternative of landfill.”
To read more on the case for energy from waste please refer to the report from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers available here
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