Waste – Dec 2

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From the dump to the pump
Michael Gerber, Financial Times
Just outside Bristol, a driver is filling a J Sainsbury delivery truck with fuel. It looks like petrol but is in fact produced from rotting rubbish.

This innovation in green fuel technology is turning what was previously regarded as a source of environmental blight – landfill waste – into an opportunity for companies to save money while bolstering their green credentials.

The new fuel, liquid bio-methane, has been produced by a young British company, Gasrec, which is hoping to capitalise on the credit crunch by persuading organisations that operate large fleets to switch from reliance on diesel. LBM, Gasrec claims, will enable organisations to make significant savings on fleet fuel bills. Gasrec is the only company in Europe to make the fuel, though Prometheus Energy has led the way in the US…
(30 November 2008)

Wasted opportunities
Virginia Matthews, The Guardian
Inviting people to assess their likelihood of having liver damage by noting how many booze bottles they recycle – as the Drink Aware Trust is currently doing – might make people drink less. But could encouraging the public to take a fresh look at the congealing carcasses, mouldy macaroni and rancid ratatouilles that make up 20% of the average household’s rubbish help us shrink our food waste mountain?

By 2013, when EU plans to enforce stricter waste targets and penalties will be introduced, local authorities will have to show that they are taking radical action to tackle the 6.7m tonnes of food – worth £10bn annually – that currently ends up in landfill sites that emit greenhouse gases.

While local authorities are experimenting with a number of different options for diverting food from the waste stream, it’s the potential for extracting usable methane energy, via anaerobic digestion, that currently dominates the debate. This is a waste disposal system that uses micro-organisms to convert organic waste into methane-rich biogas that can replace fossil fuels. The small amount of waste residue from the process can be used as fertiliser…
(26 November 2008)

Is it still worth recycling?
Lucy Siegle, The Guardian
After years of flinging garbage in landfill, earning the soubriquet of the ‘dirty man of Europe’ and consistently polling bottom of European recycling league tables, the British had – against all the odds – become rather good at recycling. Statistics released last month showed that we each now recycle 171kg of rubbish a year, up from just 3kg in 1983.

And then, wouldn’t you know it, the bottom dropped out of the recyclable materials market. The global economic downturn means that the global response to ‘any old UK iron?’ is a big fat ‘no’ as scrap metal reputedly plummets from £175 a tonne to a mere £25, plastic prices falling by a reputed £100 a tonne and copper by a huge £1,500 a tonne – and the very real threat that our recycling will have to be housed on Ministry of Defence bases until manufacturing picks up.

The Environment Agency has labelled this recycling crash as ‘severe’ and ‘unprecedented’…
(30 November 2008)