Waste-To-Energy and Waste Management: Austrian and EU Policy Lines

Summary

The objectives and principles of integrated waste management are very similar in Austria and the European Union. Introduction of these objectives and principles meant, for Europe, a technological revolution of integrated waste management to meet the demands of the precautionary principle: implementation of preventive or reduction schemes; initiation of material recycling and re-use; revamping and building a new generation of improved dedicated waste incinerators for that fraction of the waste which cannot be prevented, re-used or recycled. These improved dedicated waste incinerators have to comply with the demands of low emission limits. Equally, they can be considered to act as sinks for hazardous substances rather than as diffuse sources of pollution such as landfills for untreated waste.

The precautionary principle and subsequent performance standards — for obvious reasons of health care and environmental protection — must also apply to industrial co-incineration due to increased probability of hazardous contents in ‘secondary products’.

The proposed solution is embodied in the concept of ‘material flow analysis’. This entails that incineration plants act as ‘sinks’ for hazardous substances in waste: i.e. they destroy organic components by heat and concentrate hazardous inorganic substances from the original waste rather than disseminating them in a diffuse way. Emission standards for this type of incinerator have been set by pro-active authorities, based upon the ‘precautionary principle’, in such a way that immission limits in the neighbourhood of these plants are not exceeded under any meteorological instances. Continuous emissions-monitoring of a number of inorganic and organic gases, such as HCl, SO, CO, TOC, dust and others, guarantee a safe, permanent operation. Co-incineration processes or plants using waste derived or secondary fuels should, of course, adhere to the same continuous monitoring scheme as well as to equal standards of emission limits.