Tenterfield Shire Council chief executive Terry Dodds has scored a prime spot at June's National Waste to Energy Conference in Sydney, to impart his plans to investigate the feasibility of small scale plants for local councils.
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As well as the opportunity to network with industry players, the conference gives Mr Dodds an avenue to promote his concept of getting ahead of what he tags 'the recycling myth', in that there'll always be a limit to how much can be recycled. As recent events have proven, there's now also the difficulty of finding markets for what is being recycled.
"Our recyclable products are shipped to Lismore for processing, but as the global economic circumstances largely dictate what companies wish to purchase, the list of recyclable products has almost halved," he said.
"Until the circular economy and consumer habits change, councils will be faced with little choice but to bury. Although waste to energy isn't as good as not making the waste in the first instance or recycling, it's certainly far better than digging a big hole and hiding our problem for future generations to have to address."
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His presentation is entitled Waste Not Want Not -- Why do we continue to bury energy? He hopes a facility to turn rubbish into energy without it leaving the local government region will kill two birds with one stone: avoiding the need to fund more landfill sites, and generating electricity to power some or all of Tenterfield and much further.
He's hoping to also be included in the panel discussion which concludes Day 1 of the two-day gathering. The discussion will examine the importance of community support and ways to create social license to pursue W2E projects.
At the April council meeting Councillor Don Forbes raised the concern of many members of the public, in that several of the W2E techniques (burning, incineration, thermal oxidation, gasification, pyrolysis and plasma) remind them of the incinerators of old, belching black plumes of toxic smoke.
Mr Dodds put such concerns in perspective, saying the emissions of Australia's biggest W2E plant (at Kwinana, 40 kilometres south of Perth) are equivalent to seven semi-trailers an hour driving past, less than that of a traditional power plant.
"Sydney's New Year's Eve fireworks in one night is equivalent of 20 years of W2E emissions," he said.
"The Perth fireworks equals 2.5 years of emissions from the Kwinana plant.
"It (W2E air pollution) is an urban myth."
He said scrubbers in the system remove pollutants in a way that traditional power plants don't. Should a council-sized W2E plant be feasible, dealing with refuse onsite also avoids excessive transport costs and the associated pollution. Sydney's rubbish at one stage was being transported to an Ipswich facility, at the rate of 60,000 round trips a year.
Furthermore the methane being produced the Boonoo Boonoo waste cells is far more toxic than the carbon dioxide emissions of W2E.
Speakers at the conference will also address project funding opportunities, best practice in the construction of W2E plants, overseas W2E experiences (one investor's 35 energy projects in the UK and Europe are turning two millions tonnes of waste per year into 185 megawatts of power), and the current state of W2E policy around Australia.
Ten NSW councils are now backing Tenterfield's bid to fund a feasibility study into rural council-sized W2E plants, with NSW Country Mayors Association chair Katrina Humphries encouraging more to come onboard.
