Waste, Energy, and the Politics of Deployment: Early Lessons from the UK's Transition Away from Landfill

Reflections on 2004–2008

Every career has moments that set its direction without announcing themselves as such. For me, one of those moments was a conversation with Professor David Auckland.

David was a warm-hearted Yorkshireman, infectiously positive, generous with his time, and one of the earliest serious proponents of combined heat and power in the UK. He had a habit of saying hello to everyone he passed when he entered a building. He was the kind of person who made you feel that what you were doing mattered, and who saw potential in people before they saw it in themselves. His recommendation led me to my first real commercial project: establishing Oaktech Environmental, a business created to bring an Israeli waste treatment technology called ArrowBio to the UK market.

ArrowBio was a mechanical biological treatment system combined with anaerobic digestion, a process that sorted mixed municipal solid waste, separated the organic fraction, and converted it through biological digestion into biogas for power generation and a soil improver as a residual output. An industrial demonstration facility had been built outside Tel Aviv at the Hiriya landfill site, one of the largest waste sites in the Middle East, and the Israeli company was looking to expand internationally as the UK was beginning its own transition away from landfill under increasing regulatory pressure.

The UK's Department of Trade and Industry provided a grant to support technology transfer, funding me to spend time in Israel learning the system with the aim of deploying it in the British market. It was an early and formative experience of what international technology transfer actually involves: not just understanding the engineering, but translating a system developed in one regulatory, climatic, and commercial context into an entirely different one.

Back in the UK, we made genuine progress. ArrowBio secured a listing in the Environment Agency's Waste Technology Database and featured in the Juniper MBT study, at the time one of the leading industry references for the sector. We were accepted onto the UK's Waste Technology Demonstrator Programme, a meaningful validation of the technology's potential.

Then the politics intervened.

When we sought to change our demonstrator site listing and company backer to a location we felt was more commercially viable, the programme support was withdrawn. It was a setback, but the deeper obstacle proved to be structural rather than procedural. Growing negativity in the UK towards anaerobic digestion linked to mixed municipal solid waste meant that even where the soil improver output could be demonstrated to meet compositional standards, its origin from mixed waste excluded it from application to agricultural land. The regulatory framework, shaped as much by political and industry dynamics as by evidence, created a ceiling that the technology could not break through regardless of its technical merits.

I moved on to consultancy with RPS Group, where, with some irony, I found myself contributing background work to the BSI PAS 110 standard, which established the quality framework for digestate derived from non-mixed waste streams: the very regulatory distinction that had constrained ArrowBio. Alongside that I worked on incinerator bottom ash quality protocols, assessments for E.ON examining UK energy from waste facilities for refuse derived fuel, and spatial planning for energy from waste infrastructure across the Yorkshire and Humber region.

That planning work introduced a set of questions I would return to repeatedly: how do you locate large energy infrastructure appropriately across a region? How do the inputs available, the outputs produced, and the physical constraints of transport, land, and population interact to determine where a facility should sit? These were not purely technical questions. They were questions about how infrastructure integrates with the systems around it — economic, regulatory, social, and physical.

It was, in retrospect, an early lesson in systems thinking applied to energy. One I would carry forward.

It was while I was at RPS that the next chapter announced itself. Clarke Energy, a Liverpool-based distributed power business with deep roots in gas engine technology, approached me to support the marketing and sales of the Haase MBT-AD system, a German mechanical biological treatment and anaerobic digestion technology they were looking to establish in the UK market. It was an unexpected return: back to waste-to-energy, back to the northwest of England, and back to the question that had been running through my work since the Hiriya site outside Tel Aviv — how do you take a proven technology and build the commercial and regulatory conditions for it to succeed?