Finns take recycling to a new level
FINLAND, traditionally one of the world’s biggest sources of pulp and paper, is also becoming one of the most progressive countries for recycling waste of all types. Recycling is not only a solution to an environmental problem, it makes good business sense.
SA, with its patchy attempts at recycling and its growing landfill sites, can learn a few lessons from the Finns.
In Finland, recycling starts at home, with householders expected to separate their waste into glass, paper, plastics and organic matter. Hazardous waste such as paint and chemicals goes to special sites and expired medicines go to pharmacies, which dispose of them safely. Specialised companies collect construction waste.
In Lahti, a small town about 100km from Helsinki, the Päijät-Hämeen waste management company occupies a 70ha site shared by several related small enterprises.
The company is owned by 12 municipalities responsible for 200,000 households and 13,000 businesses. It employs 35 people a day and has a turnover of €13.5m a year. Communications co-ordinator Hanna Bergman says it makes a bottom-line profit for shareholders.
Päijät-Hämeen has statutory duties for waste management, as well as market activities. Last year it handled 184,000 tonnes of waste, of which 91% was recycled. It was made into fuel for the nearby power station, vehicle fuels, roadmaking materials and compost.
Tarpaper Recycling crushes tarpaper from roofing, which is 50% bitumen and 50% sand, stones and fibres. After it is crushed, it can be combined with virgin bitumen to cut the costs of road surfacing. Another company, Labio, makes biogas and compost from biodegradable waste. The biogas is sold to a refiner that turns it into vehicle fuel.
The company’s site is a magnet for massive flocks of birds. It is not far from a residential area, where households keep a daily record of “smelly days”, which are days when the slightest odour is detected. Last year about 200 smelly days were noted, setting a target for the company to improve.
Päijät-Hämeen also provides about 10%-15% of the solid recovered fuel needed by the nearby 160MW Kymijarvi Power Plant, operated by Lahti Energy. Solid recovered fuel includes wood and household waste, with a lot of plastic content. It is incinerated at high temperatures, releasing gas to fire the boilers that run the turbines.
KYMIJARVI’S first unit was built in 1976 to run on heavy oil. It was later converted to run on coal or natural gas.
The second unit, which came on stream in 2012, was the world’s first to run on recovered fuel and won the Forum for Sustainable Development’s Climate Deed of the Year award in Finland that year. A third unit will be built shortly to replace the ageing first unit.
Kymijarvi has overcome several of the problems associated with using biomass, in particular corrosion from dust and heavy metals. The process removes those two elements, the sand is re-used and the heavy metals are discarded in landfill sites.
The plant needs about 250,000 tonnes a year of biomass and operates at 93% efficiency.
Juhani Isaksson of Valmet Technologies, which supplied the gasifier, says the solid recovered fuel it uses complies with European Union regulations, and the quality is relatively good.
He says it is harder to run a gasifier as efficiently in developing countries because their waste collection system is not as well organised as in Europe, Japan or the US.
“Developing countries are going in the right direction, but they are not there yet,” he says.
An essential backup for the companies engaged in waste recycling projects is the ability to test their waste stream and their equipment under different conditions. Lahti Region Development owns a company called Energon, that offers laboratory testing facilities to anyone, including non-Finnish companies that pay €1,000 a day to use them. That’s expensive, but cheaper than building a dedicated laboratory from scratch.
Contrast Lahti with a city such as Johannesburg, where the “separation at source” project is applied only in certain suburbs (with the aim of extending it across the city next year), and a relatively small proportion of households co-operate.
MOST of SA’s recycling is done by desperately poor people to make a living, taking only what they can sell. Around some of the waste buyers’ premises on the East Rand, huge squatter camps have grown up, surrounded by litter and smothered in the smoke from spontaneous combustion within unsightly heaps of rubbish at the side of the road.
According to Pikitup, which collects rubbish and manages Johannesburg’s four landfill sites, the city generates about 6,000 tonnes of waste a day, equivalent to 1.7-million tonnes a year, and 90% of mixed waste ends up in landfill sites. “The City of Johannesburg is fast running out of landfill airspace. It is estimated that if the residents of Johannesburg do not change the manner in which they handle or dispose waste in whatever form, there won’t be a space to dispose of such waste in 2022,” it says.
Pikitup says it has plans to transform radically the way waste is handled, including promoting recycling, processing garden waste for compost, using food waste to make biogas, recycling construction debris and using residual waste to generate electricity.
The goal is to divert 93% of waste away from landfills by 2040. But a fundamental requirement to achieve this aim is a change in residents’ mind-set and behaviour.
In a recent paper on the infrastructurenews website, Peter Novella of the City of Cape Town’s solid waste management department writes that the National Environmental Waste Act of 2008 enhanced existing legislation on waste disposal. A new system of licensing and of waste classification was introduced in 2013. Novella says the time taken to achieve compliance of landfills across SA has been disappointing and in some places waste disposal remained chaotic. But over time, the legislation should result in more sustainable landfill management.
It is harder to run a gasifier as efficiently in developing countries because their waste collection system is not as well organised