Summary
¦ Using virgin wood fibre for biomass impacts raw material supply and cost.
¦ Construction/demolition accounts for 750,0000 tonnes of waste wood a year in the UK.
¦ Dalkia collects waste wood and processes it into pellets.
Wood has been exploited as a biofuel for some years now and the development of energy technologies means that it is being applied in larger capacities. It is being used to fuel not only small-scale domestic biomass boilers, but also much bigger energy plant designed to power large commercial or industrial applications, even whole towns.
Harvesting green or virgin wood direct from the forest and processing it as wood pellets for power generation not only impacts on availability of supply and therefore cost, but also has distinct implications for the environment too.
Growing, harvesting, processing and transporting wood pellets from overseas for biomass makes green wood a high embodied carbon option. On the other hand, UK-sourced wood has far lower embodied carbon. Even better, wood that has come to the end of its useful life and would otherwise be sent to landfill can be recycled as wood pellets for biomass instead, having a positive effect by diverting this waste stream from landfill.
The construction and demolition sectors alone produce some 750,000 tonnes of waste wood every year. For them, minimising site waste is particularly key, contributing to higher points under the Code for Sustainable Homes and BREEAM ratings.
Furniture production packaging and the local authority waste transfer sectors also generate significant volumes of timber. It’s estimated that up to 420,000 tonnes of waste wood is produced by households, or deposited at civic amenity sites in the UK each year. This poses a considerable challenge for local authorities and their waste management partners. Wood is biodegradable, so contributes to greenhouse gas production if allowed to decompose in landfill sites. This makes it subject to the EU Landfill Directive, which stipulates that an increasing percentage of biological municipal waste must be diverted from landfill.
Bringing each of these diverse waste wood streams together is something that hasn’t been undertaken until now. Dalkia has pioneered a model that provides organisations that don’t have the means to use their waste wood as biomass themselves with a way to reduce their landfill costs and improve their recycling volumes.
It has set up an operations division to collect waste wood and process it into pellets. It then burns the pellets in its own wood-fired energy plants, providing heat to local developments. Alternatively, it sells pellets on to customers.
The biomass produced from waste wood is suitable for heating and combined heat and power applications, such as Dalkia’s £40m life-expired wood biomass plant at Chilton in Co Durham which will export energy to the Grid.
This site, which will officially open in June, is designed to process life-expired wood, using around 120,000 tonnes of wood biomass as a carbon neutral fuel – removing it from the waste stream and reducing the energy generation industry’s reliance on fossil fuels.
By sending waste wood for processing into biomass fuel, organisations can tap into an excellent local recycling service and also ensure a sustainable supply of highly energy- and carbon-efficient biomass fuel that cannot be guaranteed through use of green wood without a negative environmental impact on the supplying forests.
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