Thank you very much.
Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I'm pleased to be with you via video conference this afternoon to talk about the role of waste to energy in the innovative energy sector.
I am president of the Energy Recovery Council, which is the national trade association representing the companies and communities engaged in the waste energy sector in the United States. In this role I work collaboratively with the Canadian Energy-From-Waste Coalition, which does excellent work in Canada.
I want to give a little bit of the perspective of what we are doing in the United States and how it compares and complements what's happening in the rest of the world. I think that will give you a sense of how other communities are engaged in this sector and driving innovation.
In the United States there are 85 waste energy facilities. I define waste energy facilities as those facilities that are using municipal solid waste—garbage or trash collected from households and office buildings, or buildings of that nature—and converting it via different technologies, whether it be combustion, gasification, pyrolysis, or plasma gasification, into electricity or steam.
Certainly there are technologies, like the one the Enerkem representative was just describing, where companies are engaged in turning the municipal solid waste into fuel. But in our association we are currently representing those engaged in the electric sector. This is an important technology in order to manage the waste in addition to generating electricity. However, it really is at its core a solid waste management function. If there were no need for trash and waste management, then there would not be a waste energy sector. The energy we receive is a benefit from managing the waste in a sustainable way.
In the United States we believe firmly in the solid waste hierarchy. After reduce, reuse, and recycle as much as you can, the preference is for waste to energy before landfilling. After you reduce, reuse, or recycle, there is going to be waste left over. The most sophisticated countries in the world have a recycling rate of approximately 60% to 65%. Nobody is recycling 100% of the waste, but those countries that have highest recycling rates have the highest utilization of waste to energy and the lowest reliance on landfills. That is a model we would like to advance in the United States, and it would certainly be an illustration of a sustainable model for Canada.
Why is the rest of the world investing so heavily in waste energy? I would argue that some parts of the world—western Europe, Asia—are ahead or are moving ahead of the United States in terms of how they manage their waste. Land mass certainly has a lot to do with a country's interest in waste energy. In western Europe, where population density is incredibly high, the value of the land is very high, and the opportunity to develop new landfills is incredibly challenging, waste energy makes a lot of sense. In a place like China, you would think they would have ample opportunities for landfill. It's a country with a land mass roughly the size of the United States, but it has four times the population. They are going to build hundreds of waste energy facilities in China over the next decade or two. They're well on their way. It's a very exciting opportunity. They are implementing policies that are driving investment in these waste energy technologies.
Why do this? In addition to land management, you want to produce electricity. Everybody has a need for energy. This is a non-fossil source of electricity that should be incentivized. This is a baseload technology. This is unlike a wind turbine. This generates power 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It has greenhouse gas benefits. On a life-cycle basis it is a net reducer of greenhouse gas emissions. For every tonne of trash sent to a waste energy facility, that is one tonne of trash that did not have to go to a landfill where it would have created methane, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It is electricity that is generated at one of our facilities that didn't have to be generated at a conventional power station. It was metals that were recycled after the combustion process and were able to be turned into other products, for which you did not need to use virgin materials. There were greenhouse gas savings for that.
When you compare the avoided emissions versus the amount of anthropogenic emissions that are emitted from the waste energy process, our Environmental Protection Agency, and others around the world, have shown that there is a net negative emission of greenhouse gases from a waste energy facility.
As the Enerkem witness mentioned, there are jobs associated with waste energy. In the United States there are more than 5,000 people employed at waste energy facilities and companies across the country. An average waste energy facility, in addition to the hundreds of construction jobs that will be available over a few years, has about 60 employees, who are well paid. These facilities can last for decades.
It promotes recycling. As I mentioned, metals can be recovered from the waste energy process after the combustion. In addition, the communities that engage in waste energy are very sophisticated on a solid waste basis. If you are going to invest the types of capital that are necessary for a waste energy facility, you most likely have a very sophisticated solid waste management approach and you have done as much as you can to get the recycling out of the waste.
In America, the communities that have waste energy have a higher recycling rate than the communities in America that do not have waste energy.
In terms of technology—I get asked this question a lot—the prevalent technology in America is combustion. All 85 facilities in the United States are combustion-based technologies. There are hundreds of companies, though, that are developing alternatives to this combustion. There are companies engaged in the gasification of waste, the pyrolyzation of waste, and plasma arc. These are all promising technologies. However, at this point in the United States, none has been able to produce this technology on a commercial scale in managing mixed municipal solid waste. I would expect that will change over the next few years as folks put more investment dollars at risk on these ventures.
As the technology enhances and improves through demonstration and commercialization, I would expect that we are going to see alternatives to combustion. At that point we will be able to evaluate the ability of those technologies to complement what the existing fleet of waste energy facilities in the U.S. and around the world are doing.
Economics really does make a difference. In the United States, one of the key reasons we don't have as many plants as they do in Europe is that land is not as critical a resource in the United States as it is in Europe. We have a vast amount of land and it is inexpensive. In Europe, they have taxed landfilling heavily, which has made waste energy more competitive.
What we need in the United States—and I would argue that it would be beneficial in Canada—is to incent policy drivers that would drive investment in this technology from the federal or state level, in our case.
The investment dollars are going to follow the policies that promote this technology. Right now that's the United Kingdom and other places in western Europe and in Asia. We would love to see that type of investment made in the United States. There's plenty of waste, and this is a technology that is proven, although it is always evolving. I think there are exciting times ahead in the sector.
I'll leave my remarks at that, and I'd be happy to answer any questions.