Maarten Dubois

Towards a coherent European approach for taxation of combustible waste

Although intra-European trade of combustible waste has grown strongly in the last decade, incineration and landfill taxes remain disparate within Europe. The paper proposes a more coherent taxation approach for Europe that is based on the principle of Pigovian taxation, i.e. the internalization of environmental damage costs. The approach aims to create a level playing field between European regions while reinforcing incentives for sustainable management of combustible waste. Three important policy recommendations emerge. First, integrating waste incineration into the European Emissions Trading System for greenhouse gases (EU ETS) reduces the risk of tax competition between regions. Second, because taxation of every single air pollutant from waste incineration is cumbersome, a differentiated waste incineration tax based on NO(x) emissions can serve as a second-best instrument. Finally, in order to strengthen incentives for ash treatment, a landfill tax should apply for landfilled incineration residues. An example illustrates the coherence of the policy recommendations for incineration technologies with diverse environmental effects.

Construction Materials from Stainless Steel Slags: Technical Aspects, Environmental Benefits, and Economic Opportunities

State‐of‐the‐art technologies that implement the industrial ecology concept only make it to the market if environmental gains and economic benefits are significant. Therefore, the article investigates, in an interdisciplinary way, two innovative technologies that valorize stainless steel (SS) slags as block masonry (bricks): carbonation and thermo‐alkali‐activation. The technical, environmental, and economic features of three SS bricks - solid bricks, perforated bricks, and lightweight aerated blocks - are compared to commercially available construction materials. Although the produced bricks meet industrial standards, technical challenges, such as optimization of alkali addition and use of metal molds, should be dealt with before upscaling to industrial production. A cradle‐to‐gate life cycle assessment that aggregates the results of the various impact categories shows that the environmental impact of solid and perforated SS bricks is lower than the impact of conventional clay‐baked bricks owing to the avoidance of additives for slag stabilization and energy consumption for sintering clay. The impact of aerated SS bricks was found to be similar to the commercially available aerated blocks. More specifically, the carbon dioxide uptake from carbonation reduces the overall environmental impact, whereas use of alkalis increases the impact. A strengths weaknesses opportunity threats analysis highlights the economic advantages of SS bricks originating from lower energy requirements, reduced dependence on primary resources, and improved metal recovery from slag. However, in order to apply the innovative technologies at industrial scale, challenges related to processing conditions, feedstock variability, and potential competition from existing brick suppliers have to be overcome.

Life cycle assessment to evaluate the environmental performance of new construction material from stainless steel slag

PurposeMany new opportunities are explored to lower the CO2 emissions of the cement industry. Academic and industrial researches are currently focused on the possibility of recycling steel production residues in the cement industry, in order to produce new “low-carbon” binders for construction materials. The purpose of this paper is to assess the environmental benefits and costs of steel residue valorisation processes to produce a new binder for construction materials.MethodsAmong other stainless steel slags (SSS), argon oxygen decarburisation (AOD)-slag has the potential to be recovered as a binder during the production of new construction materials. Alkali activation and carbonation processes can, in fact, activate the binding properties of the AOD-slag. However, AOD-slag is today only recycled as low-quality aggregate. For the present study, three different types of construction blocks (called SSS-blocks) were developed starting from the AOD-slag (one block through alkali activation and two blocks through carbonation). The data from the production of the three construction blocks have been collected and used to perform a life cycle assessment (LCA) study, comparing SSS-block production with the production of traditional paver ordinary Portland cement (OPC) concrete.Results and discussionThe analysis showed that SSS-block production through alkali activation and carbonation has the potential of lowering some of the environmental impacts of OPC-concrete. The LCA results also show that the main bottleneck in the alkali activation process is the production of the alkali activators required in the process, while the use of electricity and of pure CO2 streams in carbonation lowers the environmental performances of the entire process.ConclusionsThe valorisation of AOD-slag to produce new construction materials is a promising route to lower the environmental impacts of cement and concrete industries. This product-level analysis stresses the need of updating the LCI datasets for alkali activators and boric oxide and of widening the scope of the environmental analysis up to system level, including potential economic interactions and market exchanges between steel and construction sectors.

Identifying the interaction between landfill taxes and NIMBY. A simulation for Flanders (Belgium) using a dynamic optimization model.

In the past, legally backed landfills were emerging at an increasing pace in order to deal with growing waste generation. The negative externalities that are caused by these landfills however, together with the emergence of what is nowadays called the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome, led to the awareness that volumes of landfilled waste had to decrease. As a result, restrictions on remaining landfill capacities emerged which causes remaining capacity to be regarded as a non-renewable, scarce resource. In this paper, a dynamic optimization model is constructed to assess the evolution of landfill volumes and landfill prices in time. Carrying out a simulation for Flanders (Belgium), landfill paths and price paths were constructed for two different scenarios. In the first scenario, landfill taxes are taken up in the model, whereas these taxes were omitted from the model in scenario two. As the results show, when landfill taxes are legally levied, it takes 42 years for landfill exhaustion to occur. When no landfill taxes are being used, this period would be shortened to only 20 years. Therefore, it is clear that a legally introduced landfill tax has the effect that yearly landfilled volumes decrease considerably, managing the remaining landfill capacity in a more sustainable way. In addition, when landfill taxes are used, discounted total welfare increases significantly. So we can conclude that, from a broad societal perspective, the added value of a legally introduced landfill tax is considerable in terms of welfare gains.

Innovative market-based policy instruments for waste management: A case study on shredder residues in Belgium

In an increasingly complex waste market, market-based policy instruments, such as disposal taxes, can give incentives for sustainable progress while leaving flexibility for innovation. However, implementation of disposal taxes is often criticised by domestic waste handlers that fear to be outcompeted by competitors in other countries. The article discusses three innovative market-based instruments that limit the impact on international competitiveness: Tradable recycling credits, refunded disposal taxes and differentiated disposal taxes. All three instruments have already been implemented for distinct environmental policies in Europe. In order to illustrate how these instruments can be used for waste policy, the literature review is complemented with a case study on shredder residues from metal-containing waste streams in Belgium. The analysis shows that a conventional disposal tax remains the most efficient, simple and transparent instrument. However, if international competition is a significant issue or if political support is weak, refunded and differentiated disposal taxes can have an added value as second-best instruments. Tradable recycling credits are not an appropriate instrument for use in small waste markets with market power. In addition, refunded taxes create similar incentives, but induce lower transactions costs.

Chapter 35 – Economic Instruments

In order to stimulate recycling, a clever mix of policy instruments is needed because of the interacting external effects, the possibility of illegal disposal and imperfectly competitive markets. This chapter focuses on economic instruments like recycled content standards, taxes on virgin materials, waste disposal fees, recycling subsidies, deposit-refund or extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes and tradable recycling certificates. The literature offers support for the implementation of EPR even though this instrument has disadvantages such as transaction costs and static targets. Other instruments such as virgin material taxes and disposal fees should be used with care. Although they have proven their effectiveness in the past, they can lead to unintended side effects such as illegal disposal and pollution displacement. Little motivation has been found to use economic instruments to alleviate material scarcity. Rather, economic instruments should be used primarily to limit environmental damage in the extraction, production and waste treatment phase.