Currently, the question of what to do with the plastic waste after the plastic waste is sorted in accordance with the new waste law is very much mentioned in the media. The question of whether to restrict the sorting of plastics is being raised again. The CABH has analysed the actual situation. According to it, there is no short-term or long-term reason for the hasty restriction of plastic sorting. Nor is there any reason to make it more expensive for municipalities.
Causes of today's criticized situation
There is growing criticism of the situation where sorting lines for plastic waste have nowhere to put the so-called discards for further use. Despite the criticism of the lack of sales of sorted plastic, many recycling companies lack material for recycling.
Increasing recycling is in the systemic measures that have already started to be implemented. One of these is the newly effective restriction on landfilling of sorted waste. The cause of the short-term sales problems is the need to change long-established business relationships, which of course cannot be expected overnight. It is common for such changes in business relations to threaten a collapse and, above all, to announce drastic price increases due to soaring costs.
Let us first discuss the supposedly necessary increase in waste sorting costs as a result of the ban on landfilling. Up to now, before the new Waste Act came into force, around 60 000 tonnes of plastic waste from sorting lines were being landfilled. At a landfill price of around CZK 1 000 per tonne, the cost was therefore around CZK 60 million. CZK. Roughly half of this amount was non-plastic impurities, which can still be landfilled today within the permitted 15% limit. This leaves around 30,000 tonnes of plastic rejects that cannot be landfilled and must be used for energy purposes. This is a whole change in the management of sorted plastics that can have a cost impact. After communication with some of the municipal plastics processors, CABH has information that their current capacities are not currently fully utilised. These processors have indicated that they have a total spare capacity of 8-10 thousand tonnes. It can be assumed that the total spare capacity, including additional processors, is even higher. At this point in time, it is about linking sorting lines with processors and this is where the CABA will be active.
The energy recovery of this waste is possible at the WEEE at a price of approximately CZK 3,000 per tonne, or at a maximum of similar costs by producing TAP and transferring it to cement plants. If this waste (rejects) has been disposed of in landfill so far, the costs associated with this have been around CZK 1,000. The difference in costs will therefore be a maximum of CZK 2 000 per tonne of discard. The total increase in costs as a result of the landfill ban should therefore be no more than CZK 60 to 70 million. Converted to the total amount of sorted municipal plastics, which is around 180 thousand tonnes, the cost of municipalities for sorting plastics should increase by a maximum of CZK 300 per tonne of sorted waste, i.e. by less than 3%. From another point of view, it can be said that the justified increase in costs per inhabitant will be around CZK 6 per year.
In reality, however, even this price increase should not occur, because the sorting of plastics is largely financed by AOS EKO-KOM. The latter has increased its payments to municipalities for sorting by 11% since the beginning of the year, while at the same time increasing its payments to sorters by between 30% and 40% depending on the type of plastic. In total, this amounts to several hundred million crowns, which certainly compensates for the increase in costs due to the impossibility of landfilling the sorting waste. However, the key point is the 40% increase in payments for the sorting of usable raw materials, which is accompanied by the fact that AOS has started to reimburse all processors of plastic films and mixed plastics CZK 2 300 per tonne of processed material. Both changes allow sorters to significantly increase the amount of plastic sorted for recycling and thus reduce the amount of discards.
It is clear from the above that the new legislation does not present a systemic problem for the sorting of plastics. However, regional problems may arise due to locally insufficient capacity of TAP production facilities or due to long transport distances and smaller local production of different types of waste, including discards. Therefore, the CCAbH is currently identifying which TAP producers have the capacity to take discards, under which conditions, and thus help especially smaller technical services and smaller collection companies. However, apart from the production of TAP itself, there may be a problem with its application on the Czech market. Although the demand for this fuel in the Czech Republic is large, up to half a million tonnes a year, it is largely covered by imports of fuel from abroad. We are partly to blame for this, because until last year it was more cost-effective to dump the rejects in landfill than to turn them into fuel. That is why only 60 000 tonnes of discards from the refining of plastics went into energy recovery last year, regardless of the fact that this was not in line with the waste hierarchy. Cement plants have therefore negotiated permission to import these fuels from abroad. In the current situation, the position of the Ministry of the Environment may therefore be decisive, as it should limit these permits so that Czech cement plants consume fuels from our domestic waste as a priority.
What to do in the future?
It is clear that in the conditions of circular economy, where the aim is to make the most of all components of municipal waste, the situation is easier for large waste companies, for whom it is easier to secure all the necessary end-of-line facilities. But what are the smaller technical services to do?
The experience of the Czech Republic shows that the construction of new sorting and recycling lines requires, in the best case, about 2 - 3 years from conception to start-up and tens of millions of crowns of investment in the average operation. When it comes to municipal investment, it is obvious that cities and municipalities must use their experience gained about 10 years ago, when it was necessary to form associations of cities and municipalities for larger investments. In practice, the 'ISNO' scheme - Integrated Waste Management Systems - previously considered by the municipal sector means demonstrating a real willingness of the municipal sector to come together and pull together to integrate their waste into the circular economy, because efficient recovery means first and foremost concentrating it into larger quantities that can be efficiently sorted and finding end facilities for it.
For the technical services of smaller towns, this means treating waste as a raw material.
This means not just not letting it get wet during collection and storage, but above all treating it as a whole and contracting the end facilities for the individual components. Because with the new waste management model, the sorting plant is no longer the end facility, it is just a necessary element of the circular economy that distributes the individual waste components back to production.
Conclusion: the new legislation does not restrict sorting
It is clear from these facts that there is no relevant reason for restricting the sorting of plastics. Limiting landfilling is a step towards the energy recovery of the highly calorific fuel that is discards. Czech cement plants will no longer have to import fuel from abroad and the Ministry will not have to authorise such imports. The increased pressure of the Packaging Law on the AOS brings with it funding to increase the efficiency of re-sorting and expand recycling. It is therefore a matter of taking advantage of the new conditions and not claiming that the change means collapse because it disrupts the established way of waste management.
Contact:
RNDr. Miloš Kužvart
Executive Director of the ČAObH
tel. 724695777
e-mail: milos.kuzvart@caobh.cz
