LAWR

January 2015 Local Authority Waste & Recycling 21 RDF and suddenly become a frontrunner in Europe. Recycling creates more jobs than waste-to-energy." Lesson 3 – Do not work in silos Stet says that "UK waste manage- ment and Government tend to work in silos only looking at certain parts of the waste stream instead of the bigger picture". He adds that Defra's waste policy focuses "too heavily on municipal waste instead of looking at the whole waste picture (i.e. C&I and C&D waste)". Overall, Stet says that the Dutch tend to look at the whole picture and integrate all aspects of waste together. Lesson 4 – If you do build plants, build high energy effi- ciency ones Dutch plants have higher energy efficien- cies than UK ones, according to Stet. He also says that Dutch, German and Scandinavian plants have more energy outlets (Combined heat and power) and do more with recovering secondary mate- rials from the bottom ash meaning more revenue comes in from these sales as opposed to the "majority of UK plants performing to lower efficiencies with less energy generated per tonne of waste". Lesson 5 - Reduce red tape Corijn says that public procurement for waste treatment only takes a few months. He explains: "There is a ten- der document, you can ask for clarifi- cation questions, you do your bid and you are informed on who wins. This is a very straightforward process where both bidders and authorities do not have to invest much and can reserve their capac- ity for this particular tender." In contrast, Corjin says that in the UK the tender process tends to last for a long period, risk is for a large part given to the bidder, legal advice for the extremely large contracts are high, and the chance that the tender process fails is pretty high. Therefore, these tenders become less interesting to bid for, according to Corjin. He adds: "There is a large opportunity to simplify and standardise these tenders to make them more interesting for bid- ders in the UK and abroad and to save authorities...money." Lesson 6 – Avoid landfilling Hoogendoorn concludes by saying that the export of RDF has brought benefits for UK and Dutch firms and he expects the import of RDF from UK and other EU Member States to continue for the next five to eight years. He says:"The opportunity of import- ing residual waste for EfW purposes has proved to be crucial for the Dutch EfW plant owners and has prevented a situation of destroying of capital. It's good for the environment since EfW application is far better than landfilling, good for the UK because the improvement of the waste man- agement infrastructure can focus on material recycling since attractive alternatives for EfW are offered by the Dutch and good for Dutch EfW owners since loss of capital is prevented. "The negative environmental impact of transport is negligible com- pared to the environmental benefits gained with EfW instead of landfill- ing. This brings me to the conclusion that although prognosis made were not correct the conclusion must be that thanks to the availability of EfW capacity in the Netherlands all UK actors involved can make use of the Dutch EfW capacity and subsequently can focus on establishing advanced recycling capacity." In 2013, England and Wales exported a total volume of 1,157,895 tonnes of RDF, primarily to the Netherlands (69.6%) and Germany (12%). (source: EFRA report on Waste Man- agement in England)

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