Welcome!
Welcome at our “Waste Management” blog. We are three students of the Masters programme Technology & Policy at the Eindhoven University of Technology.
For a project we are currently examining technology and policy trends on waste management, or more specific solid municipal waste management, in the Netherlands. We will identify problems in managing innovations in this sector and design a policy intervention. Therefore we will also examine trends in other countries on this subject (like the TWA network). In this blog we will discuss our findings. Hereby we invite you to join our discussion and to post comments.

Bertus, Hoi and Mathijs

Now that we have gained more insight in the Dutch waste incineration market, pretty much the following conclusions can be drawn.

From an international perspective, the Netherlands have a good position when it comes to waste incineration. They know to do it efficiently and therefore relatively environment friendly, compared to other EU countries.

Let’s hope that Europe will ease on the im- and export regulations in the near future so that the Netherlands can profit from its capacities. They could become a leader in the race. But until it comes to that, Dutch companies do not have to sit still. There is enough work to be done in the field of incineration performance.

Today we announce our policy initiative to assure innovation in the incineration market and to create a competitive market. The SWOT analysis in our previous post indicates the specific problems and opportunities which should be addressed via our policy. Our belief is that our proposed policy measures are first of all needed to create this free, competitive market. Market power will eventually solve most problems.

We have defined a technology and a competition policy. To create effective, structural policies short and long term measures have been developed. Every measure serves a goal. Therefore the aim of each measure is described.

Technology policy

Short term
1. Goal: create a platform for suppliers and buyers
Measure: start an expertise centre for waste processing

2. Goal: stimulate innovation in incineration market
Measure: supply extra innovation vouchers specifically for waste processing innovation projects

3. Goal: lower barriers for entry
Measure: provinces have to research suitable locations for future incineration plants and develop permits for these locations

4. Goal: Stimulate research on waste processing processes
Measure: allocate within existing ‘Energie Onderzoek Subsidie’-budget funds for waste processing related research projects (1)

5. Goal: Stimulate investments in new, future incineration plants
Measure: revalue threshold ‘minimum efficiency’ within ‘Milieukwaliteit ElektriciteitsProductie’-subsidy for incineration plant (2)

Remark: Majority of the proposed measures allocate funds within existing arrangements in order to keep expenditures at an acceptable level.

Long term
1. Goal: structural progress in research
Measure: yearly fixed budget for SenterNovem (managing innovation projects)

2. Goal: stimulating investments in new incineration plants
Measure: maintain ‘Milieukwaliteit ElektriciteitsProductie’-subsidy

Competition policy
Short term
1. Goal: liberalizing market
Measure: municipalities must sell their share of stocks in incineration plants before the end of 2007

2. Goal: create dynamic market
Measure: legislation: communities can sign contracts with a maximum of term of 5 years

Long term
Goal: ensuring free market competition, prohibit price agreements
Measure: NMa (Dutch competition control agency) should be extra careful for price agreements and maybe assign an extra team for the first few years

References
1. Energie Onderzoek Subsidie
2. Steunmaatregel der Staten N 707/2002 – Nederland

In the field of incineration of waste many technological developments have taken place lately (of which some have already been introduced commercially in the Netherlands). The innovations focus mainly on the transition from incineration processes to gassification and pyrolysis processes. They offer the following improvements:

- Increase energy efficiency (in the transition of heat to electricity)
- Decrease amount of emitted hazardous components
- Decrease amount and hazardousness of residue

Source: Malkow, Novel and innovative pyrolysis and gasification technologies for
energy efficient and environmentally sound MSW disposal, Waste Management 24 (53-79), Elsevier, 2004

This SWOT on the incineration market analysis serves as our basis for designing the competition and technology policy.

Strengths
S1 long experience in waste incineration
S2 financial healthy situation
S3 cooperation with research institutes

Weaknesses
W1 current incineration capacity
W2 pollution from current incineration plants
W3 government interference
W4 little diffusion of knowledge to firms

Threats
T1 too little competition
T2 rising costs of processing per capita
T3 increasing pollution from current incineration plants

Opportunities
O1 open borders NL for waste incineration combined with stricter EU legislation
O2 energy production out of waste
O3 new innovative incineration technologies available

Combining the different strengths/weakness with threats/opportunities yields the following conclusions:
The Dutch incineration sector has sufficient experience, financial means and scientific know-how to adapt the new available incineration technologies in order to decrease pollution and increase energy output from incineration processes. Open borders for waste incineration together with the strict EU-legislation will take account for an increase in demand for waste incineration by the Dutch AVI’s.
Eventually applying new technologies and a free market without too much government interference will lead to lower prices for waste incineration. To take the opportunities and to counter the threats technology and competition policy intervention is needed.

As you probably have noticed, this weblog has presented an overview of developments and issues in the Dutch solid municipal waste sector. We stumbled upon enough material to come up with several problems in the sector needing a policy intervention. However, for the sake of this assignment (and its clarity) we will focus on one issue only: incineration capacity.

We think this issue is the most relevant at the moment (see former posts on incineration and the opening of the Dutch borders for incinerable waste) and the most in need of an intervention. We also think that a policy intervention in this specific field will trigger desired effects (for example decrease government interference) in the rest of the waste management chain.

Soon a SWOT-analysis will follow which represents our investigation of the waste incineration market in the Netherlands.

In the field of incineration of waste many technological developments have taken place lately (of which some have already been introduced commercially in the Netherlands). The innovations focus mainly on the transition from incineration processes to gassification and pyrolysis processes. They offer the following improvements:

- Increase energy efficiency (in the transition of heat to electricity)
- Decrease amount of emitted hazardous components
- Decrease amount and hazardousness of residue

Source: Malkow, Novel and innovative pyrolysis and gasification technologies for
energy efficient and environmentally sound MSW disposal, Waste Management 24 (53-79), Elsevier, 2004

In the previous post, it was said that there is a remarkable difference between the performance of West-European countries and the East-European countries. This post will elaborate more on the subject, provided with some data. A fact is that statistics about the production, composition, transport and treatment of waste are not set up in the same way in countries all across Europe. These data are also not equally detailled. That makes it hard to get a reliable overview of the European situation. Nevertheless, Eurostat knows to provide us with the graph below:

From this graph, it is becomes clear that most of the EU15 countries lead in waste incineration process, in contrast to the Eastern bloc countries, of which most are new member states. Eastern bloc countries still tend to landfill the biggest part of their waste.

Right now there is not really a matter of competing firms, since European countries have not opened up their borders for each other’s waste (in fact, Germany has closed its own, see earlier post German dump restrictions…). As of 1st January 2007, the Netherlands will open its borders. Hopefully this will lead to more competition and dynamics in the field.

A possible explanation for Eastern bloc countries (that is, new member states) to have such a backlog is that until recently, there was no incentive for them to meet the European directives for waste management and proper behaviour towards environment.

Sources:
http://epp.eurostat.cec.eu.int/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-69-05-755/EN/KS-69-05-755-EN.PDF
http://www.verenigingafvalbedrijven.nl/downloads/afvalforum_maart_2006.pdf

The EU performs well in comparison with East-Europe countries and the US, concerning waste production and waste incineration. This indicated by the newsletters of the Union of Waste Companies. Especially East-Europe is falling behind: this region has a multiple of landfills and a small number of waste processing machines. There are not many incentives for developing new waste processing machines with state aid. One of the reasons is that society is not fond of incinerating waste because of the dioxine emissions that supposedly will be released into the air. Objectives for waste management do exist, but only in policy agendas. They are not carried out in practice. The US, on the other hand, more than the half of the total waste is transported to landfills, but incineration of waste is slowly coming into use. The reason here for reluctance is again the bad reputation of waste incineration.

Sources:
http://www.verenigingafvalbedrijven.nl/downloads/afvalforum_november_2005.pdf
http://www.verenigingafvalbedrijven.nl/downloads/afvalforum_maart_2006.pdf

On May 11th one of our group members will be at conference about waste management. This conference “Grensoverschrijdend verkeer van Afval binnen de EU” will be held in the Hague.

All major dutch stakeholders will be present. Also lectures will be provided by persons from different ministries, firms and political parties. During this day we will try to actively participate in discussions and to promote our web-log. A report of the main points made at the conference accompanied with some photographs will be posted after this event has taken place.

This exciting event will give our group great opportunities to gain more insights in our topic!! We hope to attract more professionals who are prepared to join the discussions on our web-log.