Displaying items by tag: Refuse Derived Fuel
Refuse-derived legislation in the Netherlands?
17 July 2019The UK waste fuels industry is facing potential challenge from changing Dutch environmental legislation. As part of its new National Climate Agreement the government in the Netherlands is considering imposing a tariff of Euro32/t on imported refuse-derived fuel (RDF) from the start of January 2020. It also wants to add a CO2 tax of Euro30/t on industrial emitters from the start of 2021.
This is bad news for the UK’s waste export market because 1.28Mt or 44% of exported waste fuels from the UK in 2018 went to the Netherlands. The majority of this was RDF. That was more than the next two biggest destinations, Sweden and Germany, combined. Andy Hill of Cynosure Partners summed up the UK situation in the June 2019 issue of Global Cement Magazine when he said, “The UK generates more far more waste than it has landfill, recycling and alternative fuel capacity combined. Quite simply, that’s why the UK exports and has become a leading force in Europe in terms of RDF and solid recovered fuel (SRF) exports.”
Graph 1: International Waste Shipments exported from England, 2011 – 2018. Source: UK Environment Agency.
Graph 2: Destinations of English waste fuels exports in 2018. Source: UK Environment Agency.
Waste management companies and their representative associations on both sides of the North Sea are not taking this terribly well. Robert Corijn, chair of the RDF Industry Group, a European waste organisation, summed up his members response by pointing out both the environmental cost of the new legislation and the risk to jobs in the UK. “RDF export forms a vital and flexible part of the UK’s waste management system, supporting over 6800 additional jobs in the UK, and saving over 0.7Mt/yr CO2e emissions.” Robert Loos of the Dutch Waste Management Association made a similar response questioning what exactly the Dutch government was attempting to achieve.
Steve Burton, one of the directors of UK-fuels producer Andusia, went further by saying that the Dutch had proposed the move on environmental grounds because it has an incineration capacity of 8Mt/yr but produces only 6Mt/yr of waste. “So they think that by setting a tax it will significantly curtail how much gets incinerated in the Netherlands and thus produce less CO2. All very sensible if you consider CO2 in isolation in your own country. However, the Dutch Government aren’t looking at the bigger picture…” He then went on to point out that the RDF would then either get burnt elsewhere or landfilled resulting in no overall CO2 emissions reduction. His further assessment, which you can read here, goes on to speculate amongst other things that Dutch Energy for Waste (EFW) plants could end up having to cut their gate fees by more than the import tariff in order to keep running. The state-owned EFW plants would then made a loss for the tax payers until the market stabilised. It should be noted that the data from the Environment Agency indicates that Andusia exported just under 38,000t of RDF to the Netherlands in 2018.
The more prickly issues of using waste fuels may prove tricky for Dutch legislators. Corijn’s distinction above of using CO2e for the savings from RDF usage is important in this argument since burning RDF and alternative fuels, either for generating energy or making cement, still releases CO2. In the European Union (EU) it’s the biomass fraction of RDF that’s important for the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and the like because biomass emissions are counted as carbon-neutral. Remove this effect and the benefit of waste fuels are more to do with the waste hierarchy and reusing materials rather than leaving them to rot and release methane, a gas with a more potent global warming effect than CO2. Despite this, at face value, importing rubbish and then burning it to release yet more unwanted CO2 may seem nonsensical to the parliamentarians. Perhaps the other thing they should consider is that waste-derived fuels are manufactured products to set specifications. On-going arguments around the world about the developed world ‘exporting its rubbish’ frequently ignore this point.
Since the new Dutch National Climate Agreement is currently at the proposal stage it has a long way to go before it becomes law. First it has to be turned into legislation and then this has to be approved by the Dutch Parliament. As indicated so far the waste management industry will continue to fight its corner with vigour.
Cemex to convert Gádor cement plant site for renewables, waste recycling and concrete
11 January 2019Spain: Cemex has signed a Euro117m deal with the local government to convert the land used by the Gádor cement plant in Almeria for use by new projects. These will include projects in solar and wind power generation, waste fuel production from plastics and biomass and a new concrete batching plant, according to Teleprensa. The initiative is intended to create around 400 jobs.
The cement producer has also signed a similar agreement for its Lloseta in Baleares. The company announced in mid-October 2018 that it was planning to close the two plants due to reduced demand for cement and mounting European CO2 emissions regulations.
Walking the plastics tightrope in Europe
17 January 2018This week’s Plastics Strategy from the European Commission (EC) presents the cement industry with a narrowing target. If the Plastics Strategy is successful it will prevent plastics waste altogether. This will then eliminate the key calorific content of refuse-derived fuels (RDF) and disrupt co-processing supply chains at cement plants across the continent. If it is too lax then dumping plastics in landfill could become more economically viable, also changing the market dynamic. Neither extreme looks likely at this stage but the European cement industry needs to make its views known.
Cembureau, the European cement association, has done just that today with the publication of a position paper on the subject. It conveniently ignores the top two tiers of the waste hierarchy – prevention and re-use – but it does recognise that ‘high quality recycling’ is the preferred option. This is followed by the target of its lobbying: protecting co-processing. Make no mistake, this is supporting industrial behaviour change with solid environmental benefits. Its areas for policymakers to focus on include protecting co-processing: a ban on landfill; linking energy recovery to recycling; concentrating on the legislation; thinking about material lifespan sustainability benefits; and helping minimise the investment costs for processing facilities.
Providing cool heads prevail, the importance of co-processing plastics as part of any realistic plastics strategy seems unlikely to change any time soon. What’s more likely to be the real target for Cembureau is standardising measures on collection, sorting and material recovery across the European Union (EU). For example, as this column has reported twice in 2017 (GCW288 and GCW324), the issues with waste disposal legislation in Italy have led to various problems in the sector. Waste collectors found it easier to export RDF to Morocco from Italy rather than use it locally in 2016. The slag industry has also reported similar issues with reuse in Italy. The consolidation of the local cement industry following the takeover of Italcementi and Cementir by HeidelbergCement and of Cementizillo by Buzzi Unicem should present a more unified industry approach towards alternative fuels. Backup from the EC could solve the other half of the alternative fuels puzzle in Italy and help to deliver serious change. Ecofys data from 2014 showed the EU co-processing average rate as being 41%, with six countries – Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Bulgaria, Italy and Greece – having rates below 30%.
Vagner Maringolo of Cembureau outlined the market opportunities for waste uptake at cement plants at the 11th Global CemFuels Conference that took place in Barcelona in February 2017. He started by revealing that plastics represented over 40% of the total share of alternative fuels used in the EU in 2014. A ban on landfilling municipal waste was expected to boost the supply of RDF and a Cembureau/Ecofys study on the market potential of alternative fuels concluded that around 10Mt of waste was co-processed in cement kilns in the EU28 in 2015. This represented around 2% of total combustible waste each year but it represented 10% of all of the energy recovery from waste in the EU. In other words co-processing plastics waste offers a very attractive means for the EU to meet its sustainability targets.
However, before Cembureau and the cement industry starts popping the (reusable) champagne corks, consider the wider picture. China has banned imports of foreign waste in 2018 including RDF from the UK, a major exporter. Unless new markets are found this may impact the price of RDF in Europe. Brexit is another example how of European waste markets might be disrupted in the medium-term. Cement producers want a steady supply of cheap fuels but if the providers can’t make enough money from their products then the market will fail. The tightrope for Cembureau to walk with plastics is to promote RDF use and secure its supply. Persuading the EC to support this may involve some wobbling along the way.
Cembureau releases position paper on plastics strategy
17 January 2018Belgium: Cembureau, the European cement association, has published a position paper outlining its stance European Commission’s plastics strategy. The association wants policymakers to ensure any plastic waste that has a calorific value that can be recovered as a fuel source is not landfilled. At present there are differences in waste management policies across the member states of the European Union.
Other points that Cemburea wants to highlight include: a ban on landfill of recoverable and recyclable waste; recognition that cement plants can treat different waste streams such as plastics and simultaneously recycle them as material in the manufacturing process of cement and recover them as energy; the specific relevance that co-processing offers the unique opportunity of a simultaneous energy and material recovery; and the potential to minimise investment costs in dedicated facilities.
In January 2018, the European Commission published a dedicated Plastics Strategy as part of the Circular Economy package. The strategy indicates that there is currently a low rate of recycling or reuse of plastics with most of it going to landfill or used in incinerators.
Not in my cement kiln: waste fuels in Morocco
08 February 2017Last week’s Global CemFuels Conference in Barcelona raised a considerable amount of information about the state of the alternative fuels market for the cement industry and recent technical advances. One particular facet that stuck out were reports from cement and waste producers, from their perspective, about Morocco’s decision to ban imports of waste from Italy in mid-2016. The debacle raises prickly questions about how decisive attempts to reduce carbon emissions can be.
Public outcry broke out in Morocco in July 2016 over imports of refuse derived fuel (RDF) imported from Italy for use at a cement plant in the country. At the time a ship carrying 2500t of RDF was stopped at the Jorf Lasfar port. Local media and activists presented the shipment in terms of a dangerous waste, ‘too toxic’ for a European country, which was being dumped on a developing one. Public outcry followed and despite attempts to calm the situation the government soon banned imports of ‘waste’.
What wasn’t much reported at the time was that RDF usage rates in Europe have been rising in recent years and that the product is viewed as a commodity. As Michele Graffigna from HeidelbergCement explained at the conference in his presentation, its subsidiary Italcementi runs seven cement plants in Italy but only two of them have the permits to use alternative fuels like RDF. Italy also has amongst the lowest rates of alternative fuels usage in Europe, in part due to issues with legislation. This is changing slowly but the company has an export strategy for waste fuels from the country at the moment. Italy’s largest cement producer wants to use waste fuels in Italy but it can’t fully, so it is exporting them so it (and others) is exporting them to countries where it can.
In the Waste Hierarchy, using waste as energy fits in the ‘other recovery’ section near the bottom of the inverted pyramid, but it is still preferable to disposal. Waste fuels may be smelly, unsightly and have other concerns but they are a better environmental option than burning fossil fuels. HeidelbergCement engaged locally with media and local authorities to try and convey this. It also arranged visits to RDF production sites in Italy and German cement plant that use RDF to present its message. Looking to the future, HeidelbergCement now plans to focus on local waste production in Morocco with projects for a tyre shredder at a cement plant and an RDF production site at a Marrakesh landfill site in the pipeline. Graffigna didn’t say so directly, but the decision to focus on local waste supplies clearly dispenses with historical and cultural baggage of moving ‘dirty’ products between countries.
In another talk, at the conference Andy Hill of Suez then mentioned the Morocco situation from his company’s angle. His point was that moving waste fuels around can carry risks and that a waste management company, like Suez, knows how to handle them. It is worth pointing out here that Suez UK has supplied solid recovered fuel (SRF) to the country so it has a commercial interest here. He also suggested that despatching a bulk vessel of waste to a sensitive market did not help the situation and that it heightened negative publicity.
Morocco’s decision to ban the import of waste fuels in mid-2016 is an unfortunate speed bump along the highway to a more sustainable cement industry. It raises all sorts of issues about public perceptions of environmental efforts to clean up the cement industry and where they clash with commercially minded attempts to do so by the cement producers. A similar battle is playing out in Ireland between locals in Limerick and Irish Cement, as it tries to start burning tyres and RDF. These are not new issues. Meanwhile in the background the amendment to the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme draws close with a vote set for mid-February 2017. It could have implications for all of this depending on what happens. More on this later in the month.
A Tec commissions Rocket Mill in Wiener Neustadt
30 November 2016Austria: A Tec has commissioned a Rocket Mill RM 2.50 for ASA at its waste treatment plant in Wiener Neustadt. The mill has a capacity of 7 – 40t/hr and is equipped with two grinding chambers, which can be independently loaded. Each one has a main drive with 315kW. Due to the grinding technology, it also has an additional drying effect of approximately 10%. The mill is designed to produce refuse-derived fuels (RDF) with an output size of 5 - 80mm from pre-sorted and shredded household and commercial waste. It was principally built at A Tec’s plant in Eberstein.
Austria: A TEC will install a Rocket Mill at a treatment plant of A.S.A. in Wiener Neustadt to produce refuse-derived fuel (RDF). The 7 – 9t/hour plant will be taken into operation in August 2016. RDF will be supplied from the plant to the cement industry with an output size of up to 15mm.
The Rocket Mill will be mainly produced at A TEC’s production site in Eberstein. It will have a 2 x 315kW drive unit and a rotor speed of c580rpm. A TEC Group focused on the optimisation and efficiency improvement of cement plants.
Encouraging news from Egypt with the announcement that Lafarge Ecocem has taken on two refuse-derived fuels (RDF) contracts in Suez and Qalyubeya. The RDF plants will have production capacities of 42,000t/yr and 280,000t/yr respectively, after upgrades are built.
The move follows a deal Lafarge struck with Orascom in March 2015 to develop a waste management framework of municipal and agricultural waste. The plan is to achieve an average fuel substitution rate of 25% by the end of 2015. Around the same time Ecocem also signed a cooperation agreement with the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) and the Qalyubeya Governorate to upgrade a recycling plant in Qalyubeya to produce RDF. Part of the deal was intended to reinvest some of the revenue from RDF sales back into the region's waste collection infrastructure.
These production levels compare to SITA UK's new RDF plants in the UK, which has a more mature RDF market. There, the newly opened Malpass Farm plant is planned to produce 200,000t/yr and the Tilbury plant will have an output capacity of 500,000t/yr when it opens. However, the Malpass Farm plant mainly feeds one cement plant, the 1.3Mt/yr Cemex Rugby plant with a mean substitution rate of 61% in 2013. By contrast, Lafarge Cement Egypt runs the massive 10.6Mt/yr El Sokhna plant.
Co-processing at El Sokhna by Lafarge is of particular interest given the links with Egypt's unofficial household waste collectors, the Zabbaleen. Lafarge Egypt recruited and trained 140 Zabbaleen to gather waste material for RDF production. The strategy enabled Lafarge to gather continuous supplies of RDF and strengthen local stakeholder relations, as Lafarge's 2013 sustainability report puts it. Lafarge Egypt's substitution rate was 2.2% in 2012 with significant improvements made since then. The current target of 25% for the end of 2015 shows how much progress Lafarge has made.
Hisham Sherif of the Egyptian Company for Solid Waste Recycling (Ecaru) placed Egypt's municipal solid waste level at 20Mt/yr at a presentation given at the Global CemFuels Conference earlier in 2015. From this 4Mt/yr of RDF could be produced. Together with biomass derived fuel (BDF) Sherif reckoned that the country's cement plants could reach substitution rates of 30 – 40%. Problems though with increasing RDF rates in Egypt include legal complexities, institutional issues, poor services and monitoring and centralised planning with little regard for the country's unofficial waste pickers, such as the Zabaleen.
Lafarge Ecocem appears to be tackling each of these problems in turn as the deals with Orascom and the Qalyubeya Governorate show. However, spare a thought for Egypt's unofficial waste sector workers who are likely to lose their livelihoods as waste management becomes more formalised and personnel rates per tonne of waste collected tumble.
For more information on the Zabaleen, check out the documentary made about them in 2009, called 'Garbage Dreams'.
New environmental projects for Eurocement
08 January 2014Russia: Ruslan Ponomarev, deputy to the chief technical officer of the Voronezh branch of Eurocement, introduced a project for processing municipal and industrial waste as an alternative fuel in cement production at an environmental conference held in Voronezh, Russia, in December 2013.
Particular attention was given to issues involving the technical specifications and advantages of solid waste processing in cement kilns. Eurocement's new power plant in Voronezh allows for up to 300t/yr of waste to be disposed of. Thanks to the establishment of a new removal system, the project will allow the region, which has a population of over 2.5m, to cut its normal waste disposal by 90%.
Belgorod Region Governor, Evgeny Savchenko, met with the president of Eurocement, Mikhail Skorokhod, to discuss prospects for the construction of new cement production lines at Belgorodskiy Cement and Oskolcement. The construction of new lines will reduce the amount of clinker kilns at Oskolcement and Belgorodskiy Cement from six and seven respectively to one at each plant, significantly improving the environmental impact. Energy reduction is expected to reach approximately 30% and fuel consumption can be reduced more than two-fold.
"We are pleased to be working with Eurocement Group. The implementation of construction projects at two cement plants is bringing a completely new level of environmental awareness, allowing a tremendous reduction in manufacturing emissions," said Savchenko.
Mikhail Skorokhod also commented on the project: "Eurocement Group is involved in the continuous modernisation of its production facilities, in order to improve product quality, reduce energy costs and improve the environment. The transition to new technology platforms will be done without interrupting the existing production lines. Regional projects will provide orders for the construction sector in the region. This project will also provide an opportunity to create a completely new situation and quality of life both for the factory workers and residents of Belgorod and Stary Oskol."
Lafarge Pakistan and Saif Holdings sign refuse derived fuel deal
16 September 2013Pakistan: Lafarge Pakistan and Saif Holdings have signed an agreement to manufacture refuse derived fuel (RDF). The agreement was signed between Pavel Cech, Lafarge's regional vice president of industrial ecology, and Hoor Yousafzai, director of Saif Group.