Bioeconomy: S&T Committee Report

Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts

Wednesday 10th December 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, was a member of this committee and add to what the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, has said in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for his careful chairmanship—not only of this report but for the last four years of the committee. I have been a member for only three years but have much enjoyed it. I was also a member of the committee back in 2006-07, chaired, I believe, by the noble Earl, and we produced a report on waste reduction. I was therefore familiar with the concept of waste as a resource and of the degree to which waste streams could add to wealth creation. I pick up the remark of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs: where there is muck, there is money.

The UK has a poor record in the continuing use of landfill. I take on board that, as others have mentioned, our ability to measure waste streams is limited but, nevertheless, something like 57% of our waste goes to landfill whereas most of our European counterparts hardly use landfill. Switzerland, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark are all now almost stopping the use of landfill. However, there is a notable difference between them and the UK in that they all make much more use of incineration. Something like 30% to 50% of their waste goes to incineration whereas in the UK it is rather less than 10%. I shall come back to this issue in a moment.

As a member of the earlier committee I was familiar with the fact that although much is made of the disposal of domestic waste—with the selective collection of recyclable, combustible and food waste—it constitutes only 13% of what we think is our total waste in this country. Industrial and commercial waste is of much more importance than domestic waste and therefore the recycling of such waste is extremely important. Here, again, there has been a revolution. When I see a building demolished these days I wonder whether it ends up in a pile of rubble which is then recycled, either into cement or the foundations of roads and so on.

In this report we concentrated on one narrow area of waste recycling and one method of processing. We were concerned with how carbon-containing waste—organic waste such as food and forest residues, biological waste such as slurry and sewage sludge and gases—could be turned into higher value-added products by biological or biotechnological processes. A straightforward example of citrus waste, to which the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, has already referred, was given by Professor James Clark of York University. He said:

“We already take out oils from citrus waste in some other countries for various applications, flavours and fragrances and so forth. We can also now get solvents. Limonene, a very well-known chemical you can get from citrus waste, is now being used for cleaning printer circuit boards”.

It became clear as we took evidence that more or less any carbon-based waste could be converted into higher value-added products. Professor Clark added:

“I am not too far away from Drax power station where the volume of biomass to be burned is staggering. I look at it and I think, ‘If you are going to burn it, then why can we not extract the chemicals first?’ You can extract a lot of valuable chemicals in a very large volume, given the volumes we are talking about, and calorific value is not affected. In fact, in many cases you can end up with a material that is easier to co-fire with coal”.

Likewise, food and plastic waste can be converted by bioprocess into valuable chemicals, a potential world trade market of some $100 billion.

<sub>I had not appreciated until we took evidence for this report the potential revolution that the bioprocess technologies present in recycling waste gases and general plastics waste. Virgin Airways provided an example. It said:

“In October 2011 we [Virgin Atlantic] announced our partnership with LanzaTech to pioneer their ground breaking new technology, to develop the first of the next generation of low carbon fuels. Their technology uses a microbe to convert waste carbon monoxide gases from steel mills (which would otherwise be flared off direct to the atmosphere as CO2) into ethanol. The alcohol is then converted to jet fuel through a second stage process. Initial Life Cycle Analyses suggest that the resulting biofuel will emit 60% less carbon than the fossil fuel it will replace, kerosene. Moreover, because it uses a waste-stream, it creates a biofuel that does not impact on land use or food production”.

On the other waste stream I mentioned of waste plastic matter, whether from domestic or commercial waste, we were told that:

“British Airways is working with a US-based technology company to construct a state-of-the-art facility that will convert around 500,000 tonnes of waste normally destined for landfill—into 50,000 tonnes of sustainable low-carbon jet fuel, 50,000 tonnes of biodiesel and 20,000 tonnes of bio-naphtha per annum. The plant itself will be powered by the waste feedstock. The work on the detailed plant design is about to commence and we expect construction in early 2015”.

Those are two examples of the potential for creating high-value added and very useful products from what is currently regarded as waste material. This also, particularly the recycling of waste gases, holds out very exciting potential for converting carbon dioxide itself into a useful material, which the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, mentioned. A recent report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation described how carbon dioxide can be transformed into valuable materials, with huge potential if we are going to move forward with the carbon capture and storage facilities that we are talking about.

Given all this potential, one wonders what is holding things back. From the evidence we heard, I came to three conclusions. First, a considerable amount of work in this area is going ahead. The Centre for Process Innovation, one of the seven centres that make up the High Value Manufacturing Catapult set up by the Technology Strategy Board, told us that the two scale-up and proving plants which make up its National Industrial Biotechnology Facility were fully booked four to five months ahead, indicating the degree of innovation being developed in this area.

My second conclusion was that while the Centre for Process Innovation offered pilot plant facilities, the complaint from the innovators was the lack of any support for demonstration plants. I think there are opportunities within the EU framework programme to develop demonstration projects. However, there are also drawbacks to using the framework programme because these projects have to be promoted on a collaborative basis between EU partners, which is not always appropriate. In the two examples we have had—the Virgin example and the BA example—we have seen non-EU partners playing a considerable part.

This, in turn, raises the third point, which is the difficulty that small innovation firms in the waste management business have dealing with the plethora of government departments on the one hand and the fragmentation of local authorities on the other. One of our suggestions was that a BIS Minister should take the lead and act as a champion. I am delighted that the department has taken up this suggestion, even if it is a split responsibility, with the danger that the issue may fall between two stools.

I end by coming back to incineration, which I mentioned earlier. I noted the very considerable role that incineration played in limiting the use of landfill in many of our European partners. A feature of the last few years has been the growing export trade from the UK to these countries of what is called refuse-derived fuel, which is based on recycled plastics and other wastes, often from household and commercial sources. It obviously makes sense for environmental reasons, if no other, for this country’s waste to be processed in this country rather than be exported. It requires expensive transport to export it and so forth.

When we were writing the report, in spring this year, the Government had set up a consultation about the export of refuse-derived fuel. The consultation closed in May, and in their response the Government promised us that they would make a decision on the way forward. Does the Minister have any more up-to-date information about what has happened to the consultation on refuse and plastic waste in this context? One aspect of this is that quite a lot of the waste that local authorities collect is polluted in one form or another and tends to go immediately for incineration. Many of these continental incinerators are lacking in fuel, and their need for it is part of the reason why the trade has become so developed. I will be very interested if the department has any further information on what is happening in this area and why some of this potentially valuable waste is actually going to a very low-value form of processing.</sub>