LAWR

C&I WASTE Mind the C&I infrastructure gap C&I waste is still seen as a "known unknown" Liz Gyekye analyses Chartered Institution of Wastes Management (CIWM)-commissioned report on C&I waste F ormer Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld once said: "There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know." He could have easily have been talking about commercial and industrial waste, as highlighted as a "known unknown" in a report published by CIWM/Ricardo-AEA consultancy. The report, entitled Commercial and Industrial Waste in the UK and Republic of Ireland, claims that a data vacuum surrounding C&I waste arisings is creating a reactive market with limited strategic future planning. The document warns that future waste capacity in the UK will not be enough to manage the volumes of arising waste from household, commercial and industrial sources. It predicts that failure to develop infrastructure could lead a potential 15m tonne treatment capacity shortfall for C&I waste by 2020. The current outlook for 2020 suggests that a significant amount of additional infrastructure will need to be developed, beyond what is already planned and proposed. One main challenge and big gripe from the report is the issue of data – a prerequisite for business planning and infrastructure decisions. This isn't a new problem – this has been plaguing the industry since time began. C&I waste has a number of inherent qualities as a waste stream which undermine any successful data collection and modelling, unlike 10 Local Authority Waste & Recycling January 2014 municipal solid waste data associated with local authority contracts and household waste arisings. Industry experts who contributed to the report could not agree on how data on C&I waste should be collected and reported in the future. M+W Group head of waste Neil Bennett says his firm is delighted that the key issue of data was highlighted in the report. He says: "Whilst funding confidence is showing recent signs of recovery, greater certainty in forecasting the size and shape of future waste fuel supply is a fundamental element of the 'confidence' required for investors to commit to developing new capacity or services. Above all, this will, in turn, help develop the maturity of the sector." Urban Mines managing director " One main challenge and big gripe from the report is the issue of data " Peter Scholes also welcomed the report. He explains: "In terms of the available C&I data, I do think the surveys which have been delivered are sound statistically and do generate good data. The problem is that they are not repeated often enough so that trends can be developed to help in predicting future arisings, and they don't deliver enough granularity. They generate data which is useful to governments at national level but not to businesses or funders wanting to understand the likely local feedstock for a new facility, or to local waste planners wanting to understand what provision they need locally to deal with local waste." But not everybody was satisfied with the C&I report. Eunomia's chairman of consultancy Dominic Hogg, who did not contribute to the research, criticised the actual data in the report and said that it had not convincingly demonstrated a capacity gap as it did not take account of all sorts of treatments in C&I that could be used to deal with the full range of different waste streams. Data is one thing. But what about future C&I trends? M+W Group's Bennett says that the value of waste resource, coupled with increased awareness of C&I waste management issues and regulation within business, is helping to drive more intelligent service procurement decisions by waste producers. He says that these trends argue for longer term partnerships between waste producers and collectors or recyclers with facilities capable of producing and aggregating RDF in volume. Those with control of this fuel production capacity will become the main actors in providing C&I waste service, Bennett adds. Independent waste expert Peter

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