Neil Grundon, Chairman of Grundon Waste Management, puts forward his views on plans to bring Energy-from-Waste facilities into the UK Emissions Trading Scheme.

Every now and then it is important to look back before we go forward. There is not much sense in repeating the mistakes of the past in the rush towards a noble goal.

I am talking about the UK Government’s plans to bring the Energy-from-Waste (EfW) sector into the UK Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). It reminds me of when the Landfill Tax was introduced nearly 30 years ago – more of which later.

In order for the EfW and ETS scheme to move forward, operators would have to measure the amount of anthropogenic CO2 that exits the EfW stacks, with the samples used to work out how much we pay to buy carbon credits.

It is suggested (among other benefits) that doing so will help to drive behavioural change amongst waste producers, including reducing the volume of plastics in waste.

I am a big fan of measuring, monitoring and reporting – and see it as quite exciting. Indeed, we are already collecting this data at our Lakeside EfW facility. What worries me is how the sampling and testing process will be managed.

I fail to see how the industry can accurately and fairly, without challenge, measure and calculate an individual waste producer’s fossil carbon contribution. What we can do, however, is use that data to drive change in the composition of waste. 

Being able to measure those anthropogenic CO2 statistics and knowing how much fossil fuel carbon is going up the chimney gives us a strong platform to press for the removal of certain types of plastics.

If we made fewer things out of fossil fuels and instead used biofuel-based plastics, the majority of emissions become biogenic. At that point, we hand over to the nascent and ever-developing technology that is carbon capture and storage (CCS).

But I’m probably getting ahead of myself. One of my main concerns about the ETS proposal is simply that it is overcomplicated. It would be much more straightforward to charge us an emissions tax based on the data collected – we don’t need to be trading carbon credits.

The chances of the scheme involving something sensible, workable, simple and chargeable, that ends up improving the environment and the economy is anyone’s guess.

We only have to look back at the impact of the Landfill Tax to consider lessons that could have been learned.

Like most taxes, it was mainly introduced for political rather than practical reasons, as politicians from all parties found their in-trays filling almost as fast as the landfills their constituents were complaining about.

The Landfill Tax solved a few things all at once. Landfill became, along with alcohol and cigarettes, a “sin” and taxed accordingly with the “polluter” picking up the bill.

Politicians were then exonerated as the cause of the “sin”, and a clever tweak to the legislation allowed a proportion of the tax to be used locally by the landfill operator or environmental body for environmental causes.

The tax was easy to understand and apply to customers whilst being set at a level where it was easier to pay rather than change behaviour. In the early years, all it resulted in for the waste industry, apart from a few first movers building recycling plants, was a large capital expenditure on weighbridges.

This all changed when Labour came into power, the tax escalated quickly, along with fraud by certain elements of the industry.

Some sort of trading scheme was established, which only local authorities seemed to understand; and councils, fearing escalating costs and a public hostile to the most sensible alternative to landfill (namely advanced moving grate incinerators with energy recovery), quickly signed off on multi-billion pound white elephant Mechanical biological treatment (MBT) plants that residents are still paying for in 2025.

Fast forward to today and the latest government bête noir is combustion of any kind (unless it is wood pellets from America) in case it emits CO2.

That is fair enough unless you have a job to do. Namely, disposing of all the waste that cannot now go to landfills because they are not there anymore.

It feels like a never-ending roundabout from which there is no escape.

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