Gary Foster from the UK arm of URS/Scott Wilson, a consultancy group, has been visiting Australia in recent weeks, delivering a range of workshops in regional areas on industrial symbiosis (a subset of industrial ecology, with a particular focus on material and energy exchange). While he’s keen to spread the message about the UK’s program he sees the need for Australia to embrace its own program which is nationally co-ordinated and delivered at a state level.
“Based on my experience from my most recent visit, I believe that the time is now opportune for Australia to embrace a NISP program of its own…using similar processes and systems to ourselves and other countries such as Brazil, Mexico and China,” Foster told Inside Waste.
“There is a good foundation of best practice already in place here in Australia, for example in Kwinana, Western Australia and the Port of Melbourne in Victoria and numerous discrete projects in other states too from which to build,” he said.
The NISP - National Industrial Symbiosis Programme - the only national program of its kind in the world, is seen as an exemplar environmentally by World Wildlife Fund and economically by the OECD, and recent guidance from the EU is to propose that every country in Europe develops its own NISP.
“I hope that Australia ‘joins the club’ so that we can more rapidly share best practice between each other internationally, and more effectively do our bit to create a more sustainable global economy together,” said Foster.
He said the NISP provides an ideal, very business friendly introduction to industrial symbiosis, which could help to start to change business sector thinking.
“By this I mean moving from the current dominant ‘take-make-waste’ business model into something which is more sustainable and promotes the more efficient use of resources, for example through re-use and recycling activity,” said Foster.
“We encourage businesses to ‘look over the fence’ to see what opportunities might exist for discovering new ways of better utilising resources in collaboration with other businesses or organisations.”
Distance and transport are naturally seen as bigger issues in Australia, which may limit the viability of some solutions for exchanging materials inter-state. However, state level solutions could still be relevant and what would travel is the knowledge and solutions for dealing with particular resource streams in an optimum manner, according to Foster.
The industrial symbiosis approach has been proven to stimulate innovation and swiftly bring new research and development to market in the UK. In the last 12 months alone, the NISP program has claimed to reduce the carbon emissions of UK businesses by more than 750,000 tonnes. It has also been responsible for diverting 1.7 million tonnes of waste from landfill and saved 14,000 tonnes of hazardous waste.
“The figures are mainly provided by the businesses themselves and when presented back to them, they all have to be ratified by the businesses involved following completion of a project, or NISP ‘synergy’. The vast majority of these figures are then independently audited, collated and forwarded to Government,” said Foster.
It costs the UK government approx 8 million pounds per year to achieve these savings, and costs companies nothing – the service is free at the point of delivery, as government funding is received from landfill tax.
It is estimated that NISP has enabled more than 4.5 million pounds of private investment to be put into reprocessing and recycling.
Anaerobic Digestion (AD) plant has been growing in popularity in the UK, and NISP has helped several developers establish these projects including, for example the operators of England’s largest meat rendering plant. Here NISP assisted in the development of an AD facility which used tallow as a feedstock.
During development of this project NISP:
- Carried out a survey of organic resources - 65 mile radius of site
- Contacted Member businesses to ascertain disposal routes and likelihood of AD viability
- Helped the company build the commercial case for AD
- Sign posted them to Waste Resources Action Programme (UK) for grant funding
- Facilitated introductions to AD suppliers.
This plant should be built and operational by September 2011. Biogas generated by the AD plant should be co-burnt in CHP plant to generate electricity for site and export. Meanwhile, NISP will continue to assist in sign posting to volumes of organic feed stocks to the site.
Following the four NISP style workshops held in regional NSW in recent weeks, Foster said he had identified “plenty of resource efficiency business opportunities” or “synergies” in NISP language - around 168 in Newcastle alone.
“Many of the resources and solutions seem similar to the UK, however, there have been one or two surprises, for example in the potential for processing pulverised fuel ash and making it fit to use in compost, currently being considered in Australia,” said Foster.
“Additionally, my perception is that better use could be made of the biomass resource in Australia, either in returning nutrients to the soil but also in capturing some of the energy available in the process.
“I need to look at the data in more detail, but I am convinced that there will be a raft of processing techniques and technologies which we could discuss with our Australian cousins, be it through suggesting new processes for specialist glass recycling, utilising co-mingled plastics, cleaning up food-contaminated plastics, or in recycled aggregates production for example.”
