1 hour ago
3
A heated dispute has erupted in the renewable energy sector over whether generating electricity from incinerating waste should count as clean energy, with one of the peak bodies slamming it as dirty and deceptive.
The Smart Energy Council will on Thursday release a report titled Waste-to-energy in Australia: Energy solution or problem?, which concludes that the technology is not renewable, not clean and has high emissions.
Smart Energy Council chief executive David McElrea said it was unfair that waste-to-energy projects were receiving funding intended to promote “truly renewable technologies such as solar and wind”.
“It’s dirty energy, it’s the next dirtiest after coal – and that’s when they actually know what they’re burning and often they don’t,” McElrea said. “It’s bad for climate change, bad for the environment, and should not be described as renewable.”
McElrea said the facilities made most of their money from gate fees rather than electricity generation, which proved it was “waste-washing” or “waste disposal dressed up as an energy source”.
The first operational waste-to-energy plant purpose-built to take municipal waste as well as commercial and industrial waste was Kwinana Energy Recovery in Perth, which opened last year. The project received funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC).
Gayle Sloan, chief executive of the Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association of Australia, which represents the waste and recycling sector, said she was “pretty horrified” by “a very poor report” that used outdated information and ignored evidence from the NSW chief scientist who told a recent state government inquiry that generating energy for non-recyclable waste was preferable to landfill, subject to strict oversight.
“We advocate that energy-from-waste is higher on the hierarchy than landfill, and we should be capturing the energy from that rather than creating the methane by putting it in landfill,” Sloan said.
Waste-to-energy (or energy-from-waste) plants have been used in Europe for more than a century. Australia has a number of facilities that use industrial or agricultural waste, such as sugar processing or paper mills, but there is a fresh push to use municipal waste because of the growing pressure on landfill.
An ARENA spokesperson said in assessing whether a waste-to-energy project was renewable, biomass fuel such as forestry, agricultural and food byproducts was generally treated differently to “mixed waste streams that contain significant amounts of fossil-fuel-derived materials, such as plastics”. The agency confirmed it had supported both biomass and waste-to-energy projects including Kwinana based on their merits. The CEFC declined to comment.
The report commissioned by the Smart Energy Council lists 15 waste-to-energy facilities in the pipeline around Australia. There are two in NSW – one in Parkes in the Central West and one in Tarago near Goulburn, plus another in western Sydney that was withdrawn. The report lists up to six in Victoria, though Sloan noted that most of the Victorian proposals were just at concept stage because the state has a longstanding cap of 2.5 million tonnes a year of non-recyclable residual waste that can be burned for energy. The list also included some existing or proposed facilities to deal with industrial or agricultural waste, she said.
Waste-to-energy facilities have been hugely contentious with community concern running hot over pollution and potential health impacts. Sloan said Australia had some of the most stringent environmental regulations for the energy source in the world.
However, the report says claims that waste-to-energy is a low-emissions power source did not stack up because the emissions intensity was higher than grid average.
The European Union has recently added waste-to-energy generators to its emissions trading scheme in recognition of the emissions it generates. Sloan said this had been discussed for years and simply recognised that the facilities were “part of the broader industrial landscape”.
The report says the argument that incinerating rubbish for electricity avoids emissions from rotting landfill ignores the fact that landfill gas extraction can capture more than 80 per cent of the methane generated at a tip and use it for electricity. This is done by laying pipes into and across the landfill site like mining a gas field.
“Landfill gas obviously is a positive and does [create] energy, but landfill gas relies on organics into landfill, and we’re actually taking organics out of landfill – the national target is 50 per cent diversion of organics by 2030,” Sloan said. ”There are other types of material that cause emissions and the reality is landfill also creates leachate and other groundwater issues.”
The sector did not compete with recycling because about 20 million tonnes of poorly designed materials could not be recycled, Sloan said.
Veolia is one of the biggest waste-to-energy operators globally, with 65 facilities around the world. It is part of the Maryvale consortium in Victoria and has a well-advanced proposal to build a waste-to-energy facility at its Woodlawn site in Tarago.
A Veolia spokesperson said waste-to-energy was “an essential part of the circular economy” for residual waste that could not be recycled, and energy was a benefit of the process rather than the whole objective.
The spokesperson said even with the most advanced landfill gas capture technology, some methane – a greenhouse gas at least 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – still escaped into the atmosphere.
The Clean Energy Council, another peak body for the renewables sector, declined to comment.
Get to the heart of what’s happening with climate change and the environment. Sign up for our fortnightly Environment newsletter.
