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Resource Recovery From Waste: Challenges for the health of the environment

Programme background

Meeting global challenges around the use of natural resources, such as food and energy provision and water security, depends on a dual approach. We need to find new ways to use existing natural resources, along with new approaches to get more use from waste materials.

Current solutions to waste management that rely on disposal are not sustainable given a growing global population and the accelerating development of new products to meet its needs. This means that not only is the volume of waste produced increasing - the EU generates around 3 billion tonnes of waste each year - but also that its composition is changing as new materials enter the waste stream, often with unknown effects on living things.

Despite recent technological advances, a growing tension exists between recovering physical resources such as nutrients and minerals, and recovery of energy through incineration to generate heat and/or electricity, or through anaerobic digestion to create biogas.

Rarely does this trade-off start by considering the best options for the health of the environment. This is partly because quantitative evidence on the impact of new waste technologies on which to base decisions is lacking at appropriate scales or across science disciplines.

As a consequence, the anticipated environmental gains remain unclear. In particular, the effects on living things and on the human population are poorly understood and may compromise NERC goals to drive innovation for the green economy.

The vision for this programme is to lead the delivery of the strategic science needed to accomplish a paradigm shift in how resources are recovered from waste, so that it starts to be driven by environmental benefits integrated across air, soil and water resources and by considerations of human health, and not by economics alone.

Further, the programme will forge new thinking that goes 'beyond carbon' to understand waste as a resource from the perspective of its impact on the whole ecosystem and not just on carbon emissions. Its starting point is the cross-disciplinary science of industrial ecology, which attempts to view industrial activities as a wider matrix through which resources and energy flow, and in which waste from one industrial process can act as an input resource for another.

Advances in science are needed because the current conceptual framework fails to account fully for emissions to the biosphere during this process. Strategic investment is needed in quantifying the risks and opportunities for the quality of air, land and water of exploiting waste as a resource. This will develop new scientific thinking as well as more fundamental experimental research in the laboratory, field and/or through modelling.

The following have been scoped as potential areas where NERC research can drive forward the debate about the recovery of resources from waste. This is not an exhaustive list:

1. evaluating the environmental implications of extracting valuable products from carbonaceous waste;
2. understanding the effects on the biosphere of waste emissions from minerals and/or elements that have been concentrated by human activities;
3. grasping the implications of the intensification of the water cycle for water contamination and reuse;
4. developing closed-cycling wastewater systems to recover nutrient resources.

This NERC-led programme will address the NERC strategy through the Sustainable Use of Natural Resources theme priority 'predicting environmental implications of current and future use of non-renewable natural resources', and the Environment, Pollution & Human Health theme priority 'understand the impacts of waste management activities on the environment and human health'. It also has the potential to contribute to the LWEC 'health' and 'resources' challenges.