How Veolia is turning your red bin rubbish into energy

All that gunk in your red bin can help save the planet, according to the operators of Australia’s first waste-to-energy plants

First crushing of significant metal waste extracted from landfill as part of City of Darwin's new contract with Veolia. Picture: Che Chorley

It’s hard to think of the waste industry – garbage, rotting food, stinking rubbish sites, processing plants, recyclables and landfill – as sexy. But French company Veolia is pretty excited by research suggesting that more than eight per cent of Australia’s baseload power could come from transforming the gunk in your red bin to energy. The key is incineration and something called “anaerobic digestion”.

Australia produces about 75 million tonnes of waste per year, which averages out at just below three tonnes per person. Most non-recyclable waste goes to landfill and Veolia’s Australia and New Zealand chief executive Richard Kirkman says we should be using this to power our homes instead.

“We can’t continue to throw everything in landfills,” he says. “Australia needs some energy from waste. It will help with the diversification of energy supply, because you don’t want to be all on one supply of solar, or one supply of wind. And that’s what other countries have done to make sure they have a diverse energy supply.”

The war on waste is not just about converting waste to energy: that’s just one piece of the puzzle. First comes tightening regulations so that more of the packaging used is easily recyclable. We need to follow that by encouraging Australians to be more interested in recycling (we could learn from Sweden, Finland and Germany), and then working out what to do with waste that cannot be recycled. And that is where waste-to-energy slots into the concept of the circular economy.

The federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water states the national waste policy action plan agreed by all governments prioritises waste avoidance, followed by recycling. “Energy recovery is only used where it does not divert valuable materials away from reuse or recycling,” says a department spokesman.

Australia has two commercial waste-to-energy plants, both based in WA, close to being operational. Veolia has won the contract to operate the projects. It has lodged a plan application for a project in NSW, with further interest in a project in Victoria. There are about 15 waste-to-energy projects in the planning stages with state governments, and Kirkman believes that even if only 10 were operational it would dramatically reduce the nation’s need for landfill and provide an extra source of baseload energy.

“We should try to do more recycling and see how far we get, but we know we’ll need at least 10 plants,” says Kirkman. “So it would be a good idea for each state to establish two or three plants, as Western Australia has, which would move us away from landfill significantly, and leave space for more recycling and more composting.”

These plants cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and come with odour, sound and other social-licence issues that make them a target of communities not wanting them near their homes. Kirkman admits waste has a “PR problem” but Veolia is working on showing local communities how important the industry is. For instance, landfill produces methane, which has 28 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. Waste-to-energy plants, by comparison, produce some carbon dioxide but no methane. “My experience in building these facilities is that once they’re built, nobody really has any concerns,” says Kirkman. “It’s just that initial fear of the unknown. The surveys we’ve done across NSW show the majority of people want to move away from landfill and have energy for waste. If it’s near you, you’ve got more questions than if it’s further away. And that’s natural and something that we need to deal with as a business.”

As to whether these projects are a waste of money, as some suggest, Kirkman points to the fact Veolia has 65 of about 1000 waste-to-energy plants globally and is a profitable publicly traded company with businesses across energy, water and waste. In August it announced first-half earnings before interest and tax of €1.674 billion ($2.78 billion). The WA plants nearing completion are at East Rockingham and Kwinana. The Australian government’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) has made investment commitments of $147 million in the projects, which have a combined value of $1.2 billion.

“These projects are typically large scale and complex, requiring proven technology, experienced investors and integrated supply contracts,” says a CEFC spokeswoman. “While the technology is relatively new in Australia, it is commercially proven and has been deployed in other countries.”

The CEFC believes waste-from-energy projects have “the potential to reduce emissions by cutting landfill volumes while generating reliable clean energy, using our rising waste levels to provide a new source of clean, dispatchable energy”.

Waste accounted for 2.9 per cent of Australia’s emissions in the year to March 2023, according to the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Quarterly Update, up 0.5 per cent on the previous year. The two WA projects combined will process about 700,000 tonnes of waste per year, taking in about two thirds of the rubbish from homes in Perth and the Peel region. The power created from the plants will be fed into the state’s main grid, producing enough for more than 80,000 homes.

Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association (WMRR) believes waste-to-energy is a key part of the picture if Australia wants to achieve its aim of recovering 80 per cent of its waste by 2030. The figure is now about 60 per cent.

The peak body for the waste and resource recovery industry says countries that have waste-to-energy plants also have a strong recycling culture. “We’ve seen that countries that have energy facilities also have high recycling rates,” says WMRR chief executive Gayle Sloan. “So we think that there should be far more of these being rolled out.”

But she warns that waste-to-energy needs to complement existing waste-reduction processes, and says Australia needs better governmental directives on waste generators – such as packaging companies – so their products don’t end up in the red bin in the first place. “The challenge in Australia is that we have no obligation, or very limited obligations, on the generator to design, at first instance, for reuse, recover or repair, so we don’t think about what we’re placing on market,” she says.

Sloan points to Germany and The Netherlands, where there are clear policies in place for packaging generators. Our biggest packaging company is Visy, which she says does use energy from waste to assist in its production needs. “They are a good example of a company thinking, ‘How do we keep things out of landfill?’,” she says. “They treat the material in that systems-based approach. You try to recycle, and what you can’t recycle or recover, you capture energy from it rather than putting it into landfill. So when you have that thinking of stepping through the hierarchy, energy has a clear role.”

What’s needed, according to WMRR, is a national design standard to prolong the life of products currently going to landfill. There is work taking place to look at the national waste policy action plan and carbon targets, but no specific policies on waste-to-energy, Sloan says.

“It can’t be looked at in isolation,” she warns. “I would like to see a lot greater producer responsibility so that we extend the life of products and we keep them in circulation for as long as possible and try to minimise end-of-life. And when we do get to end-of-life, that energy from waste is accepted as part of the hierarchy so that we can try to reduce as much as possible the amount that goes to landfill.”

As for the question many Australians ask – whether their time-consuming separation of rubbish into recycling bins is a waste of time because it all ends up in landfill? – Veolia’s Kirkman says: “It’s very, very rare. [And] 99.9 per cent of the time we’re recycling that material. It’s in our financial interest to do so.”

Occasionally there will be an issue and red waste and recycling is mixed but he says it’s amazing how these rare occasions always seem to end up in the media. “It is an exception to the rule,” he says. “It’s like saying all motor vehicles crash on the roads. Sure, you can find a picture of a car on the road that has crashed, but it doesn’t mean they all do crash on the road. If it goes in the red bin you have to pay. If it goes in the yellow bin you can get paid for that.”