International Review of Waste Management Policy - Department of ...

56.2.1 A Waste Levy
The existing landfill levy is too low. Everyone appears to agree with this, but this does
not mean landfill taxes should be increased ad infinitum. Principles of public policy
suggest that some justification for a level of taxation should be provided, and the
most solid justification (at least in the sense of the principle) is the internalisation of
externalities associated with the activity in question.
The measurement of these, however, proves to be somewhat more difficult. We have
provided a review of literature on the external costs and benefits of residual waste
treatments in Annex 61.0. This highlights the fact that the literature is far from
equivocal, even where the preference for landfill vis a vis incineration is concerned,
especially where attempts are made to consider all social costs.
Several actors, organisations and bodies highlight the desirability of using life-cycle
assessment to determine preferences for the environmental performance of waste
facilities. However, life-cycle approaches, whilst usefully setting out estimates of
possible impact in different assessment categories, do not use a common metric that
enable easy alignment with environmental damages, as monetised through economic
techniques. Indeed, in our view, life-cycle assessment approaches are more shaky in
terms of the insight they bring to the complex systems we are dealing with. By way of
illustration, in Annex 62.0, we have carried out some comparative analysis using the
tool WRATE, developed by the Environment Agency in England and Wales, to show
how the choice of facilities and impact assessment methods can shift analysis in
favour of one or other facility. This seemed relevant given that some recent modelling
using this tool was undertaken in a recent appraisal of the performance of MBT for
the EPA. 1044
Over many years, Eunomia has developed an in-house model of residual waste
treatments which allows for the modelling of both life-cycle impacts of facilities and
their external costs and benefits. This model has been used in analyses for many
local authorities in the UK, for the UK’s Committee on Climate Change and WRAP, and
for other bodies such as the Greater London Authority. In this study, we have
modelled the external costs and benefits of different residual waste treatment
options with a view to understanding how a waste levy might be structured, and to
understand the relationship it bears to the levy already proposed as part of the
aforementioned RIA. 1045 Details of the modelling are given in Annex 63.0.
We have modelled the following treatments
1) Landfill, Landfill, untreated untreated residual municipal waste ( (RMSW (
RMSW RMSW) RMSW (50% (50% lifetime lifetime capture)
capture)
This is a landfill where the gas capture rate is set at 50% over the facility’s
lifetime;
1044 Fehily Timoney & Company / Veolia Environmental Services / Ramboll (2008) Critical Analysis of
the Potential for Mechanical Biological Treatment for Irish Waste Management: Volume 2, Research
Report, Report for the Environmental Protection Agency, September 2008.
1045 AP EnvEcon (forthcoming) Regulatory Impact Analysis on Proposed Legislation to Increase Levies
on Shopping Bags and Certain Waste Facilities, Final Report.
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