Energy from waste: What are the alternatives?

At GHD, we are dedicated to enhancing circularity and promoting sustainable waste management. We collaborate with clients, suppliers and communities to move waste up the hierarchy, focusing on prevention, reduction, and innovative recycling methods. Our efforts include the following:

• Technology developments to prevent waste production

• Analysing alternatives and advocating for source segregation through education and communication

• Developing recycling facilities and employing advanced recovery processes, such as the chemical recycling of plastic waste

• Supporting energy-recovery technologies, including anaerobic digestion, gasification, and pyrolysis, to treat truly residual waste

Our partnerships with local authorities and communities drive the creation of clear and robust policies and strategies, complemented by social-value incentives that reduce and recycle waste. We also integrate digital tools to optimise performance and design more efficient waste-management systems.

Prevention and reuse
The most efficient way to manage waste is to prevent it from being generated in the first place. Adopting a circular economy helps address the climate crisis by keeping materials in use for longer, reducing the need for new resource extraction and manufacturing. Initiatives such as reuse, repair, and sharing are reshaping consumer habits, creating sustainable lifestyles, and fostering local green businesses.

Examples:
Heston in the loop — a circular-economy neighbourhood
Crystal Palace Library of Things — community resource sharing
The Felix Project — surplus-food donation
Zero Waste Otaihanga (New Zealand) — community-driven waste reduction
Social-initiative projects like repair cafés and upcycled bikes at household waste recycling centres (HWRCs)

Digital tools
Digital innovation offers exciting opportunities, from second-hand-clothing apps to food-sharing platforms and packaging trackers.

Examples:
Olio — connects communities to share surplus food
Hurr — enables circular fashion through rental services

Recycling 
Effective recycling provides economic and environmental benefits. However, success depends on location-specific systems, clean material collection, and public participation. By March 2025, standardised collection services for common recyclables and separate food waste will be mandatory in the UK. These efforts, coupled with other new waste regulations, tightened extender producer responsibilities, and a deposit-return scheme (DRS), aim to drive higher-quality material recovery.

The future of recycling
Future advances, including robotics and AI, will further improve material separation, enhancing the quality and usability of recycled products. Technologies such as chemical recycling of hydrocarbon-based plastics will enable the production of virgin-grade materials, keeping even hard-to-recycle items like plastic films in circulation.

Reducing waste through social-value projects such as training prisoners to be bike mechanics, upcycling bikes, and selling these products at HWRCs promotes reuse, sustainable transport and skills development.

Recovery: Waste-to-energy technologies
Anaerobic digestion of food waste offers a sustainable way to generate renewable energy while producing a nutrient-rich soil improver. Although the infrastructure for food-waste collection and processing is well-established, its efficiency and cost-effectiveness depend heavily on the quality of the input materials (e.g. low contamination rates) and the market demand for high-quality digestate.

Thermal waste-to-energy processes, such as burning residual waste, convert waste into heat, which in the UK is primarily used to power steam turbines for electricity generation. This heat can also be harnessed for various applications, including steam reforming for hydrogen production, district heating networks, or other industrial processes. The environmental and operational performance of waste-to-energy facilities is significantly enhanced when they are optimised for both heat and power usage, facilitating greater energy recovery.

The transition to a circular future presents numerous opportunities for technological innovation and economic growth. However, it also involves overcoming significant challenges.

Opportunities

• Technological advancements: Innovations in waste separation and treatment technologies are opening new avenues to recycle greater quantities of different materials, reduce emissions, improve energy efficiency and mitigate climate change impacts. These technologies are crucial for achieving global climate goals and present opportunities for growth.

• Policy and regulatory support: Enhanced government and regulatory backing for low-carbon technologies, coupled with initiatives to reduce waste and boost recycling and reprocessing, can drive the adoption of effective education, communication, infrastructure and technologies.

• Public- and private-sector collaboration: Growing recognition of the need for collaborative efforts between the public and private sectors to achieve sustainable energy transitions. This collaboration can facilitate funding, technology sharing, and the development of supportive infrastructure.

Challenges

• High investment costs: Deploying state-of-the-art technologies involves significant upfront capital investment and can attract high operational and maintenance costs, which can be a barrier to entry. Projects often require long development timelines and complex financing structures.

• Technical and operational risks: Integrating new technologies into existing systems can be complex, posing technical and operational challenges. These include the need for specialised skills, managing technology interfaces, maintaining system reliability and mitigating technological risks.

• Economic viability: The viability of schemes can be significantly affected by the stability of revenue streams, the availability and value of financial incentives such as carbon credits and market price fluctuations for commodities such as carbon.

• Regulatory and policy uncertainty: While regulatory support is a potential opportunity, inconsistent policies and a lack of clear guidelines can create uncertainty and hinder investment.

• Public perception: Waste-treatment schemes have a long history of public opposition and are now being compared on a carbon emissions basis to other forms of conventional (natural gas), renewable (solar, wind) and nuclear energy.

Talk to us
To talk to us about our services and projects, please speak to one of our specialists.