Landfill alternative offers powerful case

 At a recent IHEEM waste seminar, Gary Connelly, a technical consultant at environmental technology consultancy the Cameron Corporation, described a technology which he explained can effectively convert 85% of the European Waste Catalogue of materials into an inert residue, is “cleaner and cheaper” than incineration, and can generate both electricity and waste heat. As HEJ editor Jonathan Baillie reports, a key target market is healthcare facilities.

Gary Connelly began by explaining that he had been professionally involved in waste management for 22 years, latterly with Ethos Energy, the developer of both the technology, and of the UK-manufactured “on-site advanced thermal treatment plant” for clinical and pharmaceutical waste which harnesses it. Speaking at the “Safe management of healthcare waste” seminar, he told the audience that, while landfilling might still be the “predominant waste disposal option” throughout the EU, with landfill space rapidly filling up, the EU Landfill Directive’s stringent provisions, and a current standard UK landfill tax rate (for 2010-2011) of £48 per tonne (a rate set to rise by £8 per tonne each year from 1 April 2011 until at least 2014), pressure to identify alternative disposal methods which were not only practically effective, but also environmentally acceptable to local communities, was rising. Meanwhile, should the UK fail to meet its own EU-stipulated targets for reducing the volumes of waste sent to landfill, it could face “highly punitive” fines. Furthermore, with energy becoming more and more expensive, waste disposal methods which, as a spin-off, could produce energy via “alternative” methods relatively cheaply, made sound practical, economic, and environmental sense. Were such arguments not sufficiently persuasive, the EU Landfill Directive was expected to extend to industrial waste within three years, while targets for increasing renewable energy generation were backed by the EU Renewables Directive. Moving to examine the new “on-site renewable energy technology” (which the Cameron Corporation has been developing with Ethos Energy), and its potential advantages in a healthcare setting, Gary Connelly explained that it was based on a process of “staged and separated pyrolysis, gasification, and thermal oxidation”. Already “proven in the field” via over a decade’s operational processing, the technology had undergone two years of intensive trialling by the Ministry of Defence, and been subject to real-time Environment Agency monitoring, with no compliance failures to date.

Lower emissions