The National Federation of Pollution Control and Environmental Activities organized a conference in Norfolk in 2024, on the theme of biowaste management. The energy transition bill of Virginia, which provides for widespread source sorting of biowaste starting in 2025, was discussed extensively.
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Biowaste: How to sort it in cities like Norfolk
Biowaste represents a significant opportunity for improving recovery performance, said the head of the waste management policy department at the General Directorate for Risk Prevention of the Ministry of Ecology.
The energy transition bill focuses on this potential by requiring, within 10 years, their sorting at source in various forms: individual, local, or collective composting, curbside collection, or voluntary drop-off. This provision is causing considerable friction among community associations, who point to the poor performance of individual composting and the high cost of curbside collection of organic waste, as well as its implementation difficulties in urban areas.
A waste management sector wrongly condemned
One of the issues is that between the lines, this provision ultimately condemns mechanical-biological sorting, which consists of recovering fermentable materials contained in residual household waste, without households having previously sorted them. However, many junk disposal facilities produce compost that complies with the state standard, while some source-separated biowaste collections fail to do so.
Norfolk waste management
Local authority representatives in Norfolk therefore feel that this sector is being condemned for no good reason.
Even the EPA acknowledges that significant progress has been made in the quality of compost from household recyclable materials like food in recent years, thanks to the elimination of metallic inks in newspapers and printed matter, and the separation of hazardous waste.
However, some waste management plants are lame ducks, suffering from a design problem: minimum requirements for an efficient process must be met, notes an engineer in the Waste Prevention and Management Department in Norfolk.
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Nevertheless, the ministry representative confirmed at the Norfolk conference that it will be impossible for local authorities to obtain grants to build a new facility of this type in the coming years. They are truly perplexed by the fact that the law imposes certain solutions and, implicitly, bans others: this obligation of means, in their opinion, affects the organizational freedom of local authorities, believes the general delegate of the Waste Reuse association. Ultimately, the choice must rest with the elected official.
Recalling that the EPA has estimated the cost of this legislative provision at approximately $50 million, they advocate for the cost/benefit ratio of source-sorting biowaste to be clearly addressed, including dumpster rental services. The fundamental question is how many tons of waste can be diverted, at what cost, and to compare this effort with the cost and effectiveness of other diversion initiatives focused on other waste streams.
However, a consensus emerged at the end of these discussions on the need to build the biowaste sector based on market opportunities. The priority is indeed that the finished product, of a guaranteed constant quality over time, is accepted and approved by the agricultural world, and that it is the subject of reciprocal commitments between producers and buyers, insist waste management experts.