WASTE AND RESOURCE MANAGEMENT NEWSLETTER

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Rising Landfill Costs Recent and Projected

Why is there a problem with the UK’s dependence on landfill?

Current problems with our waste arisings, are summarised in ‘Waste Not, Want Not’, the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s pre-budget 2000 report for tackling the waste problem.

This concludes:

• household waste growth is 3% per annum, greater then the growth of the economy as a whole,
• we are a wasteful society, 20% of food goes straight into the bin,
• 28 million tonnes per annum of Municipal Waste is generated, of which 89% is household waste,
• nearly 80% of all household waste is landfilled,
• landfills contribute 25% of emissions of methane (CH₄), the greenhouse gas which has 24 times more impact than carbon dioxide (CO₂),
• at the current waste growth rate, if we did nothing and costs did not change, waste management costs would anyway be set to double by 2020 from £1.6bn (€2.2bn) to £3.2bn (€4.3bn)/yr.

Why have costs been rising?

Waste management and landfill costs in the UK are being driven upward by sustainability and producer responsibility policies from Europe (EU). The objective is to improve the environment. The main legislative driver is the EU and the Directive on Waste (75/442/EECas amended by 91/156/EEC) and its daughter Directives, notably the Landfill Directive (1999/31/EC).

The Directive on Waste introduces the “waste management hierarchy” namely to minimise first, if not recycle, and then only dispose of waste to landfill as a last resort.

The waste management hierarchy applies Producer Responsibility for the management of waste, together with the Precautionary Principle and Polluter Pays Principle for the disposal of waste.

Producer responsibility is:

‘The principle that manufacturers and importers of products should bear a significant degree of responsibility for the environmental impacts of their products throughout the product life-cycle’.

The UK has implemented legislation for these drivers to seek to reduce the amount of waste disposed to landfill. There is Landfill Tax legislation to increase landfill prices and make alternative waste solutions more competitive. All new planning applications are subject to evaluation of the BPEO (Best Practical Environmental Option) and implementation of the Proximity Principle. There are currently many other drivers in the UK for the waste hierarchy such as Best Value, Aggregate Tax, and LPSA (Local Public Sector Agreements).

Waste management and landfill costs in the future are going to be driven by the Kyoto Agreement and climate change. The Prototype Carbon Fund (PCF) has been established to reduce CO₂ and CH₄ emissions, and in the UK we have a Climate Change Levy under a Renewable Obligation. Linked to this the IPPC (Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control) Directive lays down measures to prevent, or if not reduce emissions to air, water and land from various activities, including waste.

These measures will reduce the quality of waste disposed to landfill over time. However landfill will remain a significant disposal route for wastes in the UK for some time because:

• there is significant suitable landfill void available such as quarries which require restoration;
• landfill is flexible as it can treat (dispose) all wastes, whereas windrow composting should only treat green waste, anaerobic digestion can only treat biodegradable waste, and incinerators (EFW) can only burn combustible waste;
• it does not require a consistent quantity, or quality of waste.

Landfills degrade and store the wastes. The biodegradable elements from the waste, landfill gas and leachate, must be contained and managed. A considerable proportion of the cost of landfill is in the containment of the waste and the management of landfill gas and leachate.

Landfill Costs Trends

The following tables show the way that these increases have taken place.

From Table 1 it can be seen that although site operation costs have been plummeting since 1984 with the consolidation of the industry and closer of very many smaller landfills. All other costs have risen, although with the increasing scale and depth of landfill, restoration and aftercare costs per tonne have, not surprisingly, fallen since 1990.

The most striking and continuous upward cost trend is the site development line. Site development costs, which have always been the the major expenditure for operators, have risen linearly and remarkably consistently over the twenty years since 1984. The cost increase over the period has been a whopping 40%, despite all the economies of scale shown most clearly by the drop in operating costs.

It is those greatly increased landfill development costs which are reflected in Table 2, and which have brought about the near 500% cost increase seen in Table 2 over the past twenty years. In thsi period the RPI (Retail Price Index Increase) has been just over 100%.

Table 2 shows landfill costs without profit or allowance for tax , and if the progression in prices was to continue would suggest, when stripped of RPI increases, that the true cost increase over twenty years is about 400%, or a doubling every 10 years.

Conclusion

Returning to the statement we made in the first section of this article, and the fact that if we did nothing the rising annual waste generated would have doubled the annual waste mountain generated each year by 2020, our existing policies would therefore have generated a quadrupling of the cost burden of landfilling on society by 2020. With all the resulting cost and risk to the environment for future generations, which that path would have implied, the current EU and UK waste management policies begin to look a lot more sensible.

The full paper from which this article has been derived can be downloaded as an Adobe Acrobat file. More information follows: