Business and energy minister Michael Fallon, water minister Dan Rogerson, and climate change minister Greg Barker, all appeared in front of the House of Lords science and technology committee on Tuesday and discussed the UK’s bioeconomy.
Barker told peers that other countries have a longer record in developing EfW facilities and that historical concerns about incineration have hampered its development in the UK.
He added: “There is still a significant community resistance to many energy from waste projects and that to a large part rests on the history of EFW projects.
“We are very clear there is a much greater role we can do and by comparison to Europe we are playing catch up.”
Barker also told peers that up to 2 million tonnes of wood that currently goes into landfill could be diverted to “energy recovery”.
Another area Barker is keen for the government to develop is small scale anaerobic digestion (AD) and he told peers “there have been teething problems and we have not seen as much as we would like”.
“It’s the smaller scale plants that are proving slower to get off the ground and that is where we are focussing some of our attention.”
Rogerson also said that European countries have got ahead of the UK in developing their bioeconomy because they have had the structures in place to do so.
He said: “The fact that the feed in tariff has been in operation longer in other countries has led to more AD in other countries, such as Germany.”
Rogerson added that “there are always lessons we can learn from other countries” in terms of developing the energy from waste sector in the UK, including the labelling of waste as a resource to make it easier to handle and utilise.
Fallon told peers that “there is a potential here to generate high value products and there are economic benefits from doing so in using the waste resource”, adding that the industrial strategy in BIS “allows us to promote and assist sustainable growth” in the bioeconomy and EfW sectors.