06 - Tonnes of Valuable Material Go Up in Smoke Every Year – They Don’t Have To

If the goal is to collect and recycle as much waste as possible before it ends up being burned - then this episode covers one crucial solution in making that goal a reality. 
 
We sat down with Arnoud te Winkel, Area Sales Manager at TOMRA, to chat through a waste model that has proven to increase the amount of high-value material that we recover from household waste. Waste destined for recycling, not incineration.  
 
We discuss the entire process, from start (the collection of household waste) to finish (where sensor-based technology takes over), as well as the benefits of this process, how the concept of sorting prior to incineration is viewed in the waste industry today, and how it could affect consumer behavior. This conversation is an important piece of the mixed waste sorting puzzle – you don’t want to miss it! 

Listen to the episode below, or use your favourite platform (Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcasts)

Show Notes

• Revolutionary step towards reduction of Green House Gas emission in Netherlands. [1:27] 

• Benefits of recovering valuable plastics before losing to incineration explained by Arnoud. [03:19] 

• What actually is CO2 ladder? [06:06] 

• How sorting prior to incineration functions in Netherlands. [10:11] 

• Challenges of separate source collection in high-rise buildings.[13:32]

• Companies that are investing in recycled materials making a good sustainable image. [17:40] 

• Technologies used in Advanced Mechanical Recycling. [19:00] 

• Economic advantages of sorting prior to incineration. [22:57] 

• Parting quote. [26:05] 

Transcript

Mithu: Hello and Welcome to the TOMRA Talk Circular Podcast. In this particular episode we will be looking at a tried and true waste management model that's proven to increase the amount of recovery of high value material before it's actually lost to incineration. My name is Mithu Mohren and our guest today to discuss this is Arnoud te Winkel, Area sales manager at TOMRA. Arnoud, nice to have you here.  

Arnoud: Hi Mithu. Thank you. Happy to join here. 

Mithu: So Arnoud, you are from the Netherlands what's considered to be one of the most sustainable countries in the world and along with the EU the country is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 49% by 2030 and a whopping 95% by 2050. We're comparing of course, the levels to what was existent in 1990. It's a huge huge endeavor, and I'm guessing that this needs to be addressed from different angles. Can you tell us about some of the initiatives that are in place and maybe some that are even coming? 

Arnoud: Yeah, sure. I think we need to go a bit back into history and find how we got to this ambitious goal because the fact is we were more or less forced to do it by court case that was brought to the Supreme Court by certain Environmental Groups in 2014, the last year the court of health case which forced the government to reduce the emissions from 25% below the 1990 levels by the end of 2020 so this was last year. And this is actually, the first climate change case as forced the government to connect policy this way and I expect to see it also in other European countries in the near future. If we look at some concrete examples of this policy, they are actually very diverse, they vary from local initiatives such as subsidization of renewable energy projects, home re-fits for inhabitants, more national strategy for reduction of livestock numbers for instance targeted reforestation and lowering the national speed limit on highways. In addition, more focused on our area of expertise for instance several new coal power plants are to be closed door run minimum per city and last but not least strategy has focused on investing in an efficient way to energy process reduced emissions.  

Mithu: OK, so the last one you mentioned was waste to energy and, in fact in recent years incineration has been on the rise and actually promoted as a green solution when we're looking at how to dispose of waste. And compared to landfilling, it actually is. But in a recent study by TOMRA where we talk about the Holistic Resource System, we talk about further reducing CO2 emissions, if we actually recover or sort out valuable material before it's lost to incineration. Tell us a bit more about that. 

Arnoud: Yeah, it's actually interesting topic we discussed it already in some previous episodes. There are actually several benefits from recovery of valuable plastics, so the knife has two edges in this particular case. First of all, we reduced the CO2 emission by not burning the toxic high calorific materials, which is completely in line with European Union emission targets, and in addition to that the recovery of recycled plastics reduce the use of primary resources. So, in this case we recover more material to recycle. It's also in turn results in reducing CO2 emissions. So, as you might know the use of recycled content on the market is promoted increasingly. This material is not always available on the market at this moment, so this fact forces us to look outside the existing sources and look more into recovery of valuable materials out of mixed waste streams. And the recovery from plastics out of household waste is a very important factor in this. We just need to recover as much valuable material as possible to meet at European Union quotas. For instance, specific target for plastic packaging recycling by 2025 is 50% and we're still a long way from that but I think we are on the right track. 

Mithu: OK, well that's certainly optimistic. That's nice to see that. There are several examples of this particular process in place, in Norway, in the Netherlands. I'm sure there are others. What's been going on in the last few years? 

Arnoud: Well, since I'm a Dutch inhabitant myself of course I've watched the developments in the Dutch market closely. I started working with TOMRA in 2009. And the first initiatives already started. We had some nice discussions about the potential recovery of valuables, and this led to the first concrete project where the recovery was initiated by Dutch company called Attero in 2011. At first they only recovered mixed plastics and multiple streams, rated material films and beverage cartons. They would recovered from the household wastes by mechanical recycling process. Later they built their own treatment to further create mono-polymer fractions with high quality. And based on this and partially in parallel other companies like Omeron, AEB in Amsterdam, HPC and AVR, all incineration companies and mainly incineration companies invested in advanced mechanical recycling processes to recover more values from waste. 

Mithu: OK. One of the companies that you just mentioned is AVR, and on their website they actually talk about, uh CO2 ladder and their role in it. Can you help us understand that a little bit better?  

Arnoud: Yeah of course. I'll be happy to clarify it a little bit. So, I understand that the CO2 ladder is not well known term for everyone but I will try to explain it a little bit. So, CO2 ladder0 is meant as an instrument to support the transition to a low CO2 society by deriving as much of components as possible from residual waste so AVR typically does that they state they do it by recovering all raw materials and feeding them back into society and by drawing as much sustainable energy as possible from the installation process by reducing their own energy consumption and making the process more sustainable. So if I translate this to a simple example, what they do is they supply heats electricity and steam to households and companies in the regions of their sites, which in turn saves companies from having to generate their own heats and that ways reduce CO2 and reduce CO2 emissions. They also have other projects ongoing which includes France´s initiative to recover CO2 from their fuel gas chimney which in case can be used in green houses to reduce the fossil gas consumption of CO2 To summarize up to concrete number in 2020, AVR reduced in equivalent of more than 22,000 tons of CO2 through the separation of plastics and beverage cartons and this does not even include the other projects and initiatives they have. So, it's definitely interesting it's definitely a very dynamic process which is continuously improving and yeah as we stated in the beginning, we also need to do this to be able to meet the ambitious targets the government and for the whole country. 

Mithu: And it sounds like AVR and probably, the others are frontrunners at what they do so. How is this process the sorting prior to this case incineration? Where, we also talk about this when it comes to landfilling but in this case it's incineration how is this perceived generally in the industry?  

Arnoud: Well, the image for sorting prior to incineration towards the population is improving communication of their green targets by the incineration companies. Which is of course an important factor for the public opinion and also the new legislation that is set out by the government. By these specific companies this advanced mechanical recycling process is also used as a unique selling point for their tendering process. So, in Netherlands, we have a system where the household waste is tendered by different regions where the with the incineration companies can bid and they have to meet certain criteria, and as a scourge behind it and one of the important factors of the scoring model is efficiency and also the climate footprint they have. So, of course they can prove that they have an efficient process, where they have recovered a lot of valuable materials and reduce a lot of emissions, then they have big chance to win contracts, and yeah AVR in this case has processing contracts with large cities like Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. They struggle with organizing source collection system plastics especially in densely populated cities with large share of high-rise building, so as you can imagine if you live in a flat and a high rise building you don't have space for a lot of different bins to do separate collection for a lot of different waste streams therefore they try to make it easier for the population and to be able to put certain waste streams together. Of course, we still do separate collection of organic waste because it's just a big pollution factor for the valuables, but post collection separation is therefore a very important solution for these cities. And with the construction of the sorting facility, AVR aim to offer a wider range of service to existing and prospective customers and support them and improving recycling rates of municipal waste. And I think they have succeeded we have both systems in the Netherlands. We are also supplying and supporting the concepts for both systems with source collection. And the post-consumer sorting out of household waste and there are definitely interesting advantages in both systems. 

Mithu: OK. Is the system complicated? Could you take us through that process? 

Arnoud: Well, it depends how you define complicated. Of course, for us in the business it's relatively easy but you have to think about start, so where the waste is collected from the households everybody knows it. Your waste is collected in the bin or in the bag, it's collected by a garbage truck usually. It's taken to the installation company directly or via some transfer stations. And after it enters the installation company it undergoes a mechanical pretreatment process. So, the bags are opened by bag opener the organic fraction is removed. So even though we have a separate source collection of organic material in the Netherlands, there still is a high organic content present in the household waste. So, we need to remove this by this mechanical process in order to increase the quality and the purity of the recyclables. The material is screened in different fraction sizes not up to be able to process it efficiently. The light and heavy material, so the films and the bottles and heavy parts are separated from each other and then in the end, our sensor-based technology comes into play that's where we create the mixed fraction of valuable plastics that are later offered for recycling. So, in the end it's a pretty complex process which can be influenced on a lot of different positions. But all the components together make complete quality, and this is what makes it so effective. And of course, we've seen in the last few years we've seen a lot of developments, and trends not only on our own technology but also in the other technology that is used. So, in this case we think it's a very dynamic business with a lot of potential also for the future. 

Mithu: Are there any limits, quantity or or any other sort of limits to this process? 

 Arnoud: Well, the process is fairly flexible. It needs to be, because the material we process and the material that's collected from the households is very diverse. So, we need to prepare ourselves for a lot of different types of material that arrives in the plants. One of the things we need to take into account that not all the material that is offered to these plants is suitable for recycling, simply because the composition is not the way it should be, there is not enough valuable material in there to make it feasible to sort or sometimes it's not feasible to incinerate it because the moisture content is too high for instance. So, these are the limits that these kinds of incineration companies need to calculate with. If you take into account that only AVR on their side is incinerating 1.3 million tons of waste per year. You can imagine what kind of volumes we are talking about, and what kind of challenge it is to process these kinds of materials into high quality and recovered fractions. 

Mithu: You touched on this a little bit before, when you're talking about organic waste being taken out or the need to take it out and in fact in the holistic resource system, we also talk about separate source collection and for specific materials streams. One of those is organic paper, E-waste and others one thing that we purposely leave out is plastics. So, with this system how does it influence a consumer behavior? Does it make it easier for them, to manage or handle their waste? 

Arnoud: Well, as I said it differs a little bit if you look at the region where the system is operated so we have some rural areas where a separate collection system for packaging plastics functions quite well because the people have the space for the different bins, they are disciplined and they're sorting. They are well educated by the municipalities and they're motivated to do it. But in other areas big cities with a lot of high-rise buildings people simply don't have the space and they want to make it easy for themselves and this is what the then the municipality tries to facilitate by allowing them to dispose a mixed fraction of household waste which includes packaging plastics. Just to get back on your questions, just now we also have a separate collection system for paper, for glass, of organic so this in my opinion is a must, in order to keep the rest of the material as efficiently as possible.  But if I look at AVR at the example, I think they've published a case study where they noticed that after commissioning their advanced mechanical sorting plant prior to incineration, they recovered as much plastics in one month by sorting prior to incineration, compared to the source collected plastics they collected in one year, so this means that they collect 12 times as much as plastics with the new system prior to incineration, than they did with the old source collection system so you really see there's a big big difference in the big cities if you take initiative into your own hands and make it easy for the consumers and try to recover the plastics in another way. 

Mithu: OK that's amazing 12 times is much. So this is really about maximizing the amount that we can collect to recycle. 

Arnoud: Correct! Yes. 

Mithu: Let's turn our attention now to the actual output. Until now PET seems to be the plastic of choice when it comes to recycling at least. And in systems where there is a well-functioning Deposit Return Scheme, this might be the best way to get to that particular material. So, if we assume that this is the case, why should we be thinking about sorting prior to disposal, so incineration and landfill? 

Arnoud: Yeah, I totally agree. I think the PET packaging Deposit Return Scheme is a very nice example of how well a system can function. But of course, not everyone and not every country has a well-functioning Deposit Return System, so this is of course the goal. In the meantime, we will need to get the material from wherever it is and as I stated before there are different types of systems in the Netherlands, we are focusing on all the different fractions we can achieve and we can get, and only a deposit return scheme simply is not enough to achieve the ambitious target set by the European Commission and also by the local government at this time. 

Mithu: So, it's really a matter of maximizing what we're getting? 

Arnoud: Definitely. And if we come back to the topic of circular economy if we really want to get to a true circular economy, we need to get as much material as possible and this is only possible in combination with advanced mechanical recycling, where we can get the material back to virgin like qualities with highly detailed mechanical process, so your recycling quotas forces to look beyond the current state and develop the processes further than they are at the moment.  

Mithu: And who's buying this material? What are they using it for? 

Arnoud: Well, in the Netherlands, we have a specific system. So, most incineration companies that recover the valuable plastics right incineration have a cooperation with the company called Net Fund, this is the organization which was established for the fulfillment of the obligations under the EPR or the Dutch packaging industry, and following this cooperation this company is responsible for the further sorting and recycling of the output of a sorting facility so they are the intermediary for the materials. So of course, the goal of this mechanical recycling process is we can shift the process from downcycling, which is sometimes the case to real recycling to produce high quality products and reduce the amount of virgin materials that's required for the production process and substitute them by high quality recycled content. So, there are already some nice examples currently buying material from the Dutch market. So, there are some companies like IKEA, Phillips, L´Oreal, etc. which are buying recycled material to use in their new products. And therefore getting a nice sustainability image. 

Mithu: So, these brand owners are actually taking the material? 

Arnoud: Correct. Different types of qualities, not only PET, but also polyolefins mainly in different types and different colors so it's a very interesting development. 

Mithu: OK that's very good news. what's really interesting here Arnoud, if I understood you correctly is that the waste that's coming from household can actually be turned into high quality recycling, using what's called advanced mechanical recycling. So now it's not actually a matter of reducing CO2 emissions, but actually recovering all the material that's out there, as much as possible, you've already mentioned this as well. I'm guessing we have to have specific technologies in place. What sort of technologies are we talking about? 

Arnoud: Yeah, your assumption is totally right. So, let me go back a little bit and clarify that we at TOMRA have done a lot of research in the past few years to get this process totally visible and as well functioning as possible. So, we invested a lot of time and effort and resources into exploring the options for the high quality recycling of different types of polymers recovered from household waste. So you can think about different types of sorting so not only by material but also by color and by density. So of course all of this is done by means of sensor based sorting, we have a broad portfolio where we can influence a lot of parameters in the different products. So they start by cleaning up the fractions that are recovered from household waste into mono polymer fractions with a high purity. But of course, with sensor based sorting, we can only get to a certain level because there is a lot of mechanically added impurities to the material such as organic content, fluids, whatsoever, so in order to really increase the quality further we need to do a washing step. So cold and hot washing in combination with some cleaning detergents to really remove the contamination from the materials and leave a really clean input material for the final sorting step which is the flex sorting. So we grind the material to a very small size and we do final cleaning step where we remove again impurities that were released by the washing process. And as a final step of course you can imagine we did not really talk about that yet but one of the main points for plastic recovered out of household waste of course is smell. If you smell your waste pain at home you can imagine what I'm talking about. This is of course something which will stick to the material until the end. So thankfully we found a solution for it in this process final step we do with deodorization and step to remove the smell and contamination and finally the material afterwards reaches final quality is extruded, which leads to a final quality which can then be sold to some packaging produces which I just summarized. 

 Mithu: This technology is fairly new I believe. Is it unique? 

Arnoud: I think the technology as such is not unique but the way it's combined into one big process is unique in this case. So, the technologies are such have been modified in order to produce the optimum performance for these kinds of materials. So, it's really the combination of different steps this is also where our knowledge lies. We've done a lot of consulting and testing with these kinds of applications in order to be able to develop the best possible process. And this is really unique. We now introduced a new plan together with some partners where we we demonstrate this process from beginning to end. And this is very very very promising for the near future. So, the level of sorting for plastics is very advanced, we are able to influence a lot of parameters on the material and we are able to produce a very very high end quality, really comparable virgin plastics. 

 Mithu: So, when you talk about partners, it sounds to me like there are different partners that maybe we haven't worked with in the past. That we're coming together and really making a concerted effort. Why do you think this is happening now? 

Arnoud: Well, I think that demand from the market to packaging producers to increase the usage of recycled content is starting to increase, also based on the public opinion and the PR campaigns that are being executed. So, more and more companies are looking into it, whether they are forced to or not. But it's definitely a clear trend we see, and of course we are happy to support with our knowledge and our technology to get these systems up and running and I think it's definitely a must if we will be able to reach the target of the European Commission set for 2025/30. 

Mithu: So it sounds like it's legislative forces consumer demand that's really pushing all of this. But we also need to look at the business side of this for these incinerators and the industry in general. What are the, if any, what are the economic advantages for engaging or doing this pre-sorting? 

Arnoud: Well, as I mentioned a bit earlier the way the incinerators processed their waste material provides them with the environmental footprint. And this in turn can lead to higher gate fees. So better reward for processing material. Of course, they have a more sellable from the materials they recover. If they recover the valuable plastics before installation, they have a lower calorific value into their incineration process which leads to a more efficient process with less emissions and that in turn results into lower CO2 taxes for them. So, this is an initial economic fact that will provide them with the benefit. So, I think in term, it's a very interesting business all in all and that's why also a lot of companies in the Netherlands decided to invest also because it's partially subsidized by the government in order to increase the targets, they´ve set for themselves.  

Mithu: So, a worthy investment in many ways it sounds like to me. 

Arnoud: Correct! yes  

Mitu: OK one last question, Arnoud there's always room for improvement. So, what's next how can we improve this process? 

Arnoud: Yeah, I always liked this question because, of course we spend a lot of time in different types of waste sorting facilities not only for household waste but every type of waste. Plastics is a very hot topic and what we always see, I've seen it a few weeks ago for myself again, designed for recycling is a really really important topic. So we still see that of course every type of technology has its limitations. It's not different for us. But if you see the reason for these limitations then you think to yourself it should not be this hard to improve the type of packaging. So, let's say to use different types of materials for certain labels or certain multilayer packaging. Lids, colors, you name it. With a lot of companies try to put a bit more effort into design for recycling I think this will be a gigantic impact on the recovery rates at the end of the chain. So, if there would be one thing that I would like to see in the coming years, is that there would be a bigger focus on these types of design for recycling initiatives. Thankfully we are already in contact with a lot of packaging producers which are showing some really nice new innovative types packaging. So, we are independent of color, but we have different traits and type of distinction factors where we can still recover the packaging with a very high quality and efficiency. but I think there's still a lot of work to do so, this is definitely something I would like to see improved. 

Mithu: Arnoud, Thank you for taking time. I know you're a busy guy. So, Thank You for taking the time to better understand how actually an existing method already is making a difference in climate change. 

 Arnoud: Thanks a lot, Mithu. It was a pleasure. 

Mithu: I'd like to leave you with this Walter Stahel, a Swiss architect, who's been influential in developing various fields in sustainability has said, “the goods up today are the resources of tomorrow at yesterday's resource prices”. To learn more, go to tomra.com.