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Testing - No Waste of Time

The UK produces approximately 434 million tonnes of waste every year and, despite the fact that recycling has dominated the news agenda so much in recent times, these levels continue to rise.

CERAM knows there is a lot you can do to manage waste and use it more effectively, particularly if you make use of the latest testing technology available.


Municipal Solid Waste (MSW), if managed correctly, can prove a valuable source of fuel thanks to advanced thermal treatments designed to extract the energy it contains, a concept that many local authorities across the UK are only really just beginning to take notice of.

The primary reason is legislation. The safe and cost effective disposal of waste is becoming increasingly important in Europe - EU demands for higher environmental standards of waste disposal are now in place. Together with the lower carbon emission targets set by the Kyoto protocol this means three things for UK municipalities:

  1. They are under pressure to reduce total waste produced
  2. Emissions produced by waste on landfill sites must be limited and monitored
  3. Processes employed to utilise waste emissions and the energy it contains as fuel must also have limited impact on the environment.

Reducing total waste, is proving a tough enough challenge but even when looking at points two and three in isolation it seems local authorities face an uphill struggle when it comes to waste, particularly when you consider one important issue - landfill composition varies dramatically from one site to another. When you add into the mix the other trace concentrations of gases and vapors also present at most sites, which again also vary according to the specific landfill composition, it becomes clear just how sensitive the testing procedure needs to be simply to monitor general emissions.

But detecting potentially harmful gases/contaminants is one thing, ensuring that landfill can be used efficiently, and with minimum impact on the environment, is quite another.  The main issue here is that actually 'releasing' useable energy from landfill is itself a process which requires energy and can therefore have an undesirable effect on the environment.

Thankfully, help is now at hand in the form of advanced thermal treatments such as Pyrolysis and Gasification. These treatments rely on less or no oxygen to fuel the combustion process and require much lower heat levels than traditional incineration methods, and produce syngas which has significant potential in terms of energy recovery.

The problem with both these processes is that they require very specific filtering and cleaning stages in order to achieve their objectives and to comply with the requirements of the Waste Incineration Directive.  Our dedicated landfill team at CERAM has carried out extensive testing on syngas, often discovering that trace levels on contaminants have ‘made it through’ and have subsequently impaired turbine/generator performance dramatically.

The equipment, expertise and knowledge now available to local authorities, and the organisations they employ to process waste, means that emissions/content can be analysed to the finest detail, that energy conversion rates can be maximised and that process failures caused by contaminants can be identified and appropriate solutions produced.

[January 2008]
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Emma Tang or Carol Baddeley
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