ACR+

Executive summary

“Addressing today’s obligations and goals, with no prejudice for tomorrow’s ambition“

The EU Landfill Directive requires the pre-treatment of waste before it is sent for landfilling. This is aimed at minimising the impacts of landfilling, but it causes an important side effect, in that it increases the cost of final disposal.

Incineration itself may be considered as a pre-treatment (as also mentioned amongst the possible treatments in the EU Landfill Directive), given that it leaves behind ashes and slags that (at least in part) need landfilling. Incineration, though, creates a lock-in effect which often prevents proper recycling, due to the need to continually feed incinerators with a given tonnage, ensuring the pay-back of investments and eventual profits.

There is a need to define suitable pre-treatment in a way that, whilst ensuring the negative impacts of landfills are reduced, keeps the flexibility required to continuously improve the performance of waste management systems, adapting equipment and operations to increasing amounts of clean materials (dry recyclables and biowaste) generated by separate collection. With regards to this, a “Material Recovery and Biological Treatment (MRBT)” system that combines biological treatment and sorting equipment allows us to “stabilise” the organics that are included in residual waste, so as to minimise their impact once buried in a landfill, while also helping to recover materials such as metals, plastics, paper that are still included in residual waste after separate collection. While pursuing the goals of the E U Landfill Directive, this option also embeds the needed equipment and processing systems that may support an ever-increasing amount of separately collected materials for recycling, as required by the ambitious mid and long-term targets of the EU’s Waste Framework Directive.