Memorandum submitted by Eunomia Research
& Consulting
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
In response to your request concerning the Environment
Agency inquiry we offer the following plus the willingness to
submit oral evidence on these issues. The scope of the evidence
presented here addresses, in part, the following terms of reference:
— Concerning how successful the Environment
Agency has been in its role as enforcer of environmental regulation
and controls, and how well it manages its wide range of activities;
— Its relationships with Defra, Defra
sponsored bodies and the rest of government, including the Agency's
role in the planning system;
— The Agency's relationship with non-governmental
stakeholders and the general public, and how the Agency monitors
satisfaction with its services.
These issues are addressed principally as they
relate to the issue of waste policy, management and regulation.
It is argued that the Environment Agency has overstepped its remit
in the domain of policy formulation, significantly muddying the
water in respect of the responsibilities of Defra and the Environment
Agency. Furthermore, it is argued that Environment Agency research
appears to proceed, at times, in a manner which shows limited
appreciation of the policy context, and indeed, at times seems
to undermine it. Finally, in areas where Defra appears to have
ceded responsibility to the Agency (for reasons that are not always
clear), the unfortunate consequence has been that resulting policy
and guidance has been unsound.
RELATIONSHIPS WITH
DEFRA AND
RESPONSIBILITIES FOR
POLICY DEVELOPMENT
1. The area of waste management policy has
been one of quite considerable change in recent years. The review
of the Waste Strategy by the Strategy Unit, which reported at
the end of 2002, highlighted the complexity of (and resulting
confusion from) arrangements for developing policy in respect
of waste. As well as pointing out that responsibilities were being
invested in two departments—DTI and Defra (and it might
have added that ODPM has a significant role also in respect of
local authorities and waste planning), it highlighted the fact
that the Environment Agency was becoming involved in policy debates:
As well as DTI and DEFRA, the Environment
Agency has also taken a role in trying to clarify policy. Whilst
this is understandable, it adds to confusion. DEFRA and the Environment
Agency need to work together to ensure there is a clear interpretation
of EU waste policy from DEFRA, and the Environment Agency needs
to play its role in ensuring this interpretation is used consistently
in the provision of advice across regions.
2. In our experience, the relationship between
Defra and the Environment Agency has not always recognized the
increasingly political role being played by the Environment Agency,
even as Defra itself—supposedly—retains responsibility
for the majority of the development of waste policy. This is leading
to a situation where Environment Agency staff are effectively
pursuing agendas which are not always aligned with stated Government
policy and objectives, frequently seeking to support their case
with research which is ultimately supported (financially) by Defra.
CONCERNING AGENCY
RESEARCH AND
GUIDANCE
3. There are a number of instances one could
site of the Environment Agency over-stepping the mark—frequently
to the embarrassment of Defra staff (and sometimes to others within
the Environment Agency)—in respect of their public pronouncements
on policy and guidance in relation to waste management:
— Following two studies—separated
by several years—of the potential impacts of composting
facilities on health, the Environment Agency issued Guidance on
the distance which should separate residential properties and
compost facilities. This study was based upon the assumed desirability
of achieving limits which were below the background levels measured
in many of the recorded measurements. This Guidance has led to
a heightened degree of stigma surrounding planning applications
for compost facilities. There is also clearly inconsistency in
the Guidance. We are not aware, for example, of a need to ensure
that incinerators are located at sites where no citizens are exposed
to above background levels of emissions such as sulphur oxides,
oxides of nitrogen, particulate matter, secondary particulates,
etc even though it is known that incremental changes in concentration
of these pollutants do have impacts upon health;
— The recent fun and games surrounding
the Environment Agency's announcements concerning the relative
performance of disposable nappies and re-usable nappies was interesting
for a number of reasons. The first was the fact that the research
was based around a small number of responses from households as
to how they use their re-usables; the second was the fact that
the research was done at all at the time (given that WRAP had
already been given responsibility to increase use of reusables);
the third was the apparent silence on the part of Defra as regards
the quality of the work or its implications for their plans for
household waste reduction. This left the impression amongst most
people involved in waste management that the Environment Agency
was intervening in policy matters in a completely uncontrolled
manner—a sort of loose cannon over which Defra had lost
control.
4. What concerns us is that the Environment
Agency seems keen to grab headlines at any cost. One has the impression
that the attitude is that "any news is good news". The
Environment Agency would appear to spend considerable sums of
money on corporate communications, policy matters, and various
head office functions. Not all of this expenditure appears commensurate
with the role the body is supposed to play, and it would be interesting
to know how much of those costs are recovered through charges
levied upon industry (which are intended to cover the costs of
regulatory functions).
5. In terms of research, the majority of
Environment Agency research in respect of waste continues to be
dominated by two themes: landfill and life-cycle assessment (LCA).
The prominent position of studies on landfilling reflects a somewhat
backward looking Environment Agency. As for the work on life-cycle
assessment, the manner in which this has developed would appear
to have been left very much for the Environment Agency to determine,
with little or no input from Defra. The Environment Agency's use
of LCA to influence policy debates, and to seek to have its own
LCA tools used in (for example) developing municipal waste management
strategies has already had significant consequences, and it is
our view that this programme of work needs to be monitored far
more closely than it has been by Defra. The recent decision to
abandon the concept of Best Practicable Environmental option (BPEO)
in the Waste Strategy was a welcome move, and one which was partly
influenced by ongoing frustrations at the clear possibility to
make a case for anything to be the BPEO, and in particular, the
lack of transparency in the life-cycle modeling often used in
presenting cases for BPEO. Notwithstanding the desire of ODPM
to see greater transparency in decision making, Environment Agency
work on a successor to the seriously flawed WISARD model continues
apace, even though no obvious use for the tool exists. (The revised
Waste Framework calls for more by way of life-cycle thinking,
but quite clearly stops short of recommending full-blown life-cycle
assessment, which is frequently at odds with other approaches
to assessment, including, for example, cost-benefit analysis).
6. Finally, in respect of research, the
Environment Agency's work in setting up the New Technologies Data
Centre has been somewhat troublesome. The Environment Agency's
Waste Technology Data Centre website claims that:
— The Waste Technology Data Centre
gives the facts on how waste treatment technologies work, as well
as how much they cost to build and maintain.
7. It claims to provide:
— impartial information on the regulation,
authorisation, performance and costs of waste management technologies
and their overall environmental value.
8. The site shows marginally more than 20
technologies have been studied (the cost of this would be interesting
to know), few with complete or informative details.
9. Amongst the technologies considered,
the site looks at incineration. Evidently, this is a sensitive
topic in the UK context. The data on costs (shown in full at Annex
1) for one facility suggests a cost of £15.37 per tonne.
No one with any knowledge of the industry seriously expects an
incinerator to cost just £15.37 per tonne today. It is not
clear what the Environment Agency really believes this information
should be used for.
10. Also, some interesting footnotes appear
under the study concerning incineration, which many non-governmental
groups might take issue with:
I regard this process as the reference
point by which all other disposal routes for municipal waste should
be assessed. The process offers a "one stop shop" in
other words the unsorted and untreated waste enters the plant
and is reduced to ash and energy only, no further processing is
needed. The process and its technology is well established, reliable
and cost effective. It suffers two main weaknesses:
— Public acceptability.
— Low overall thermal efficiency.
With respect to 1) above, a modern
incinerator unlike its forbears is in air pollution terms a clean
process. The degree of containment achieved by a modern plant
is potentially exemplary and ensures litter and odours are both
held within the confines of the building. In recent years architects
and engineers have worked together to enhance the aesthetics of
the plants, a number have been nominated for design awards and
plume and cooling tower releases may be heated so as to minimise
adverse visual impact. It is revealing as to how several of the
newer plants remain unrecognisable by a proportion of the local
population. Despite all of the above the prospect of building
an incinerator is virtually guaranteed to provoke considerable,
often impassioned and at times illogical opposition. This needs
to be accounted and budgeted for.
11. The comments are highly subjective and
are some distance from being impartial. This is one of the least
partial comments on the Data Centre website, though the quality
(and relevance) of the information provided in respect of many
of the technologies presented is similarly poor in many cases.
Finally, the technologies presented are a strange mix of the untried
and untested, and the technologies which have some operational
track record. It is not at all clear how the choice of technologies
was prioritized (if indeed they were) by those carrying out this
research. Sadly, therefore, this is a resource which one would
like to be able to point local authorities towards, but one cannot
do so in any good conscience because the research is so partial,
both in substance and in tone.
12. Recent comments from another Environment
Agency official suggests a clearly unfavourable disposition towards
biological treatment technologies. Perhaps this is one reason
why the Environment Agency's proposal for monitoring the performance
of MBT facilities for the purposes of the Landfill Allowances
Trading Scheme has been protracted, full of uncertainties (which
tend to be translated into additional costs in the context of
tendering processes) and liable to impose significant additional
costs in terms of monitoring of such facilities. It is to this
issue which we no turn.
CONCERNING THE
LANDFILL ALLOWANCE
SYSTEM
13. The Landfill Directive attempts to limit
the environmental impacts associated with landfill, specifically
from the degradation of biological material. The Environment Agency
is charged with being the monitoring authority for biodegradable
municipal waste being sent to landfill.
14. One key problem with the whole system
arises from the Agency's decision that 68% of any authority's
municipal waste is biodegradable and that any biodegradable recycling
is deducted from the authority's calculated biodegradable tonnage.
Because of this, if an authority can target 1 additional tonne
of biodegradable municipal waste for recycling/composting that
did not previously enter the waste stream then 0.32 tonnes will
be deducted from the authority's accounted tonnage of biodegradable
waste set to landfill (even though the actual quantity has not
been reduced). Consequently, this system encourages authorities
to reduce the arisings of inert materials and perversely instead
to increase arisings of biodegradable elements (for example by
targeting trade recycling or what would have been managed in the
garden through home composting). These two factors together mean
that residual waste, which for the most part is currently landfilled,
is allocated a biological content for accounting in the LATS system
which may be radically different to the actual content. The Agency's
approach falls short of the mark for guaranteeing compliance with
the European legislation.
MONITORING PERFORMANCE
OF MBT SYSTEMS
15. For reasons which remain unclear to
us, Defra also ceded to the Environment Agency responsibility
for monitoring the contribution of MBT systems to "diversion"
of biodegradable municipal waste from landfill. This was a strange
decision given the highly political nature of the decision. The
Environment Agency guidelines[17]
on pre-treatment processes seek to quantify the degree to which
the biogenic methane potential in input waste sent to an MBT process
is eliminated prior to any subsequent landfilling of the residues.
The approach attempts to estimate the equivalent amount of untreated
BMW that would give the same biogas production as the landfilled
MBT treated output. Continuing the mass balance calculation, the
guidance document goes on to evaluate an "MBT reduction factor"
which is the degree to which a facility reduces or eliminates
the biodegradable element of the input waste. It does this with
a series of aerobic and anaerobic tests. In doing so, the Agency
appears to be labouring under a serious misapprehension that a
biological treatment facility, which acts through the degradation
process as it affects biodegradable materials, will, under a given
range of operating parameters, always lead to the same level of
reduction in biodegradability. Consequently, any such reduction
factor which is intended to characterize a process would be expected
to vary with:
— The composition of the biodegradable
fractions, which will tend to be quite variable, both from one
day to another, and across seasons;
— The residence time of the material
in the process concerned;
— Operational parameters employed,
such as airflow through the biomass in the case of aerobic processes,
or the level of particle size reduction achieved in anaerobic
processes.
It is quite possible to avoid this mess, and
the potential to reduce the flexibility of processes to achieve
varying levels of reduction over time, by concentrating on the
outputs only. What is of interest, after all, is not the degree
to which a process achieves a greater or lesser reduction in biodegradability,
but how much biodegradable waste is landfilled. The Environment
Agency guidance monitors for "the diversion of biodegradable
municipal waste from landfill". But progress towards Landfill
Directive targets might be more readily monitored by measuring
the biodegradable content of what is landfilled. This, after all,
is what landfill allowances are issued for, and what needs to
be understood to assure compliance. Where direct methods can be
used, presumably, they should be.
COMPLIANCE WITH
THE LANDFILL
DIRECTIVE
16. Is there any benefit in multiplying
an inaccurate biological tonnage by an MBT performance factor
which itself is likely to be expensive to define, inaccurate where
there is a changing flow of material and operating conditions,
and potentially falsifiable? This cannot in any way give an accurate
indication of the biological content of the output from such facilities.
Our compliance with the European Landfill Directive is not going
to be guaranteed by costly testing for evaluating MBT facilities,
it is much more at risk of falling down due to the higher level
(backward) methodology within the LATS calculation. That is not
to say that MBT facilities should not be subject to critical environmental
evaluation (especially where it would encourage competition),
but the testing regime as established does not deliver the desired
environmental objectives or the legislative mandates.
17. The Agency approach loses sight of what
it is that MBT processes seek to do where they are used as pre-treatment
processes prior to landfilling the material. Such processes do
not only affect the potential of the material to generate methane
in landfills. They also affect pH, leachate, etc. Hence, whilst,
for the purposes of measurement, and for the purposes of allowing
flexibility across different treatments, it may seem attractive
to seek to measure the loss in biodegradability on a continuous
scale, in practice, there may be benefits to restricting this
flexibility to those treatments which reduce biodegradability
below a specific threshold. Setting such a threshold standard
would enable the material being landfilled to be handled in a
different manner to raw residual waste with some degree of confidence.
Amongst other things, the lay-out of gas collection infrastructure
could be adapted to the nature of the wastes being received, and
the nature of cover materials could be chosen to minimise the
emission of methane from the cells where only pre-treated waste
was accepted.
18. Material in landfill generates methane
under anaerobic conditions. Since anaerobic decay is a slow and
complex set of biological processes, anaerobic testing takes a
long time and is particularly costly. Aerobic decay, and consequently
testing, is much quicker, easier to conduct and considerably cheaper.
The Agency guidance seeks to correlate an aerobic with an anaerobic
test. Yet material treated for just a few days will behave more
like stable material if using aerobic tests as the readily degradable
carbon will have been lost, but anaerobic emissions (in landfill
but also in laboratory tests) will reveal a much higher remaining
biodegradable potential. This is why correlation between the two
types of test is so difficult. These tests are likely to correlate
better at high levels of stability (another argument for setting
a minimum threshold of stability for MBT processes where some
residue is landfilled). Even so, the guidance document does posit
a correlation, and the evaluated performance of an MBT system
relies heavily upon this. Unsurprisingly, the correlation comes
with no proof of the accuracy or sensitivities. Lower in the paper,
the specified test substance which the Agency requires should
be used to calibrate testing is given a value for both the aerobic
and anaerobic tests. It is, then, interesting to note that the
two values lie 70% off the suggested correlation plot.
19. What this implies for the industry and
for the UK's attempts to comply with the Landfill Directive is
that costs are likely to increase as a consequence of this Guidance.
There are two reasons for this:
— the first is that the testing regime
is unnecessarily onerous. If the Agency believes that a correlation
exists between aerobic and anaerobic tests, what is the point
of demanding that both tests be carried out? Surely the lower
cost test should suffice?
— the second point is that because
the Agency has proposed the use of the more expensive biological
methane potential test, then precisely because this test is not
widely used, those technology suppliers involved in tenders which
require minimum performance in terms of landfill diversion find
that they cannot demonstrate this to the confidence of those procuring
technologies, nor would-be financiers. As a result, costs escalate,
and it becomes very difficult indeed to adjudicate on tenders
for the provision of services to local authorities.
20. This is regrettable since MBT technologies
are a) widely used elsewhere and b) likely to be capable of being
constructed with shorter lead-times than most other residual waste
treatment technologies. The additional costs and doubts which
the Environment Agency's guidance and public pronouncements have
implied seem likely only to deepen the crisis facing the UK in
respect of meeting Landfill Directive targets. This strategic
perspective seems to have been somewhat absent in the way this
particular affair has been handled by the Agency, and by extension,
by Defra.
17 Guidance on monitoring MBT and other pre-treatment
processes for the landfill allowances schemes (England and Wales),
Environment Agency, August 2005. Back
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