Bioeconomy: S&T Committee Report

Lord Oxburgh Excerpts

Wednesday 10th December 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Oxburgh (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and his committee for what seems to me an admirable and extremely useful report. I also congratulate the Government on what seems to be a timely, positive and supportive reply. It is quite a rare event, I think—that one can have such a good report which has been so well received by a Government. The timely action which they are taking is extremely welcome.

I was going to draw attention to the situation which the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, drew attention to in figure 1 in the report, which demonstrates how poorly we do by comparison with many of our western European neighbours, with which we like to be compared under many circumstances. One actually wonders whether we would have got as far as we have with recycling had it not been for a certain amount of pressure from Brussels. I also emphasise the point, made by several speakers, that it is clear that we have a really massive information deficiency here. The new combined governmental effort should have, as one of its high priorities, the collection of useful data from people who are producing, disposing of and managing waste.

Purely by chance, I happened to be in a meeting this morning which had a presentation from the waste industry. The speaker there commented on the difficulty that he had in trying to collect information, but the information that he had been able to collect suggested that the number of anaerobic digestion facilities which were either in existence at the moment or planned was far in excess of any plausible supply of feedstocks for those digesters. He made a similar comment about landfill capability: given the prospective reduction in landfill, it looked to him as if there were going to be excess landfill facilities available. I have no way of verifying these figures independently, but if he is right, individuals are wasting money investing in facilities which are not going to be used.

The main thesis of this report, which seems to be undeniable, is that we have a massive resource here which we are not really taking advantage of, although it is perhaps not as easy to take advantage of it as some of the academic studies would suggest, and there may well be practical difficulties in all sorts of ways and all sorts of places. Just to give a feeling of the size of this resource, going back a few years when I was at Shell, one of my colleagues in North America calculated that if you were able to extract the full calorific value from the organic waste in the United States, it would be enough to fuel all surface transport in the United States. Obviously, extracting the full calorific value is not a sensible or a practical thing to do but it gives a sense of the massive amount of energy that is potentially available from this resource. As the report points out, using this resource as an energy source is in many cases not the best thing to do, but it gives a feeling of the scale of the opportunity.

The other point to make is that the technology in this area is changing rapidly. It is quite a hard time to invest when technology is changing rapidly. There is a considerable temptation to put off your investment because in six months or a year’s time a better technology will be available, and we have to bear that in mind as an inhibitor. However, the technology is relevant to the sorting of collected waste and, in essence, it is rather similar to the problems that exist in the mineral-dressing industry. You crush a rock in order to extract a particular mineral from it and then you put it through a series of processes to concentrate the component in which you are interested. Exactly the same problems exist in the case of waste. You can use many of the same techniques and, in fact, you probably want to separate the waste into four or five different components.

Therefore, there are separation technologies and then there are added-value technologies, which produce some of the high-value end products to which the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and others have referred. However, there is a snag here, which is emphasised if I read a sentence from page 8 of the report:

“A waste is something that costs you money to have taken away, a by-product is more or less cash neutral to your business, and a co-product is something that contributes profit to profitability”.

If you build up a business on the basis of someone’s waste—something that they do not care about—and then they improve the efficiency of the process, which of course is what we are telling them to do by telling them to reduce waste, you may well have invested in a capability which you cannot use properly. Alternatively, let us say that the industry with which you are working and on which you depend simply finds a much better process and does not produce that waste any more. Therefore, you have to be extremely careful and you probably have to enter into a long-term agreement to take what might originally have been seen as waste but then becomes either a by-product or a co-product. The industry concerned agrees to continue to supply you with it and maybe locks itself into a slightly less efficient way of doing things. That is what I mean by saying that sometimes the practicalities get in the way of progress. I am not saying that we should not do this; we should—it is a very high priority—but there are difficulties.

What is the role for government? Obviously we are in a time of financial stringency and suggesting that the Government put money into things is probably not a very good route to follow at the moment. However, I think that there is an extremely important role for government here in terms of sympathetic regulation and help with regulation. The problem is that we are talking about new technologies which were not in mind when the present set of regulations, whatever area you are looking at, were devised. I shall give a very good example.

A few years back, I visited a plant which was burning straw—maybe not the best thing to do with straw—to generate power. That carried enormous additional cost because the regulations under which the operators were constrained were actually those that applied to coal-burning plants. The operators were obliged to fit sensors to their flue to pick up all sorts of rather disagreeable elements that are present in coal but not in straw, such as mercury and so on. Nevertheless, the regulation was there that they had to do this. That turned a perfectly sensible operation into something much more expensive and tedious than it need have been.

This sensitivity to problems of this kind, and assistance with ways around them, is an area where the Government really could be proactive. In this new, combined interdepartmental service, there could be a way in for new technologies to say, “Look, we are being hamstrung by the regulatory system as it is at the moment. Can you help us?”. It might be a European regulation or an English regulation. It would not be that expensive and could be positively useful. Another thing that this organisation should do is provide support to local authorities, which cannot be expected to keep up with the research developments and new technologies in this area. In many cases, they probably do not have the time or competence to evaluate them properly. Again, there should be support for local authorities in understanding how to manage their waste and evaluate new technologies. At this point, I pay tribute to the work that WRAP has done, which is extremely important.

In conclusion, I can say to the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, and the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, that technology exists to make CO₂ react with material from open garbage and turn it into useful materials. There is a company called Carbon8, which takes urban garbage that has been minimally processed and reacts it with a stream of CO₂ to turn it into carbonate pellets that can then be used in building materials. That operating company is making a profit but is constrained a little by a regulatory regime from expanding. However, the technology exists.