China to bring in economic instrument to support energy from waste

China is to introduce preferential tax policies for electricity generated from municipal waste.





Waste Management World reports that China is to introduce a policy by which 100 per cent of the VAT will be refunded to the generator for selling electricity generated from the municipal waste to the grid. At the same time, wind power will be charged 50 per cent VAT. These are the new incentives to promote renewable energy in China.





Currently, there are more than 200 Mt municipal waste produced annually from 688 cities in China and the exploitable wind resource is 2,530 GW. The new policy is expected to accelerate the development of municipal waste and wind power generation.





IWM Model used to analyse potential scenarios





The list of Canadian municipalities that have used the Integrated Waste Management (IWM) Model to analyse their existing waste management systems continues to grow.





The Canadian Environment and Plastics Industry Council (EPIC) reports that the latest case is a Canadian regional municipality that used the computer-based program to investigate four different scenarios, while also using the existing situation as a base case.





The scenarios are as follows:





recovering energy from landfill gas at an efficiency of 30 per cent


recovering energy from landfill gas at an efficiency of 50 per cent


composting 80 per cent of residential food waste


composting 80 per cent of residential food waste and yard waste


The findings showed positive results for both energy recovery and composting. From a greenhouse gas perspective, the results favour composting versus energy recovery because the energy generated displaces energy produced from water power, which does not emit carbon dioxide.





The difference between the cases is 19,652 tonnes of CO2 equivalents. In some provinces, the credit for displacing power generated by using fossil fuel from the grid would be substantially greater.





From an energy perspective, the results showed that it is better to capture the methane produced in the landfill and to combust that methane to produce electricity. The difference between the two cases is 56,273 GJ, an amount equal to the electricity required by 1,300 homes. Case studies offering greater detail and analysis are available from the IWM web site, which is directly accessible from EPIC’s own web site at:





www.plastics.ca/epic or directly at


www.iwm-model.uwaterloo.ca