Making the most of waste

Food to fuel

The Mayor’s Food to Fuel Alliance focuses on encouraging the development of food waste infrastructure in London. It aims to promote and enable five food waste projects to be developed in London by 2012 to deliver one or more of the following:

• decentralised renewable heat and power
• renewable transport fuel (bio-fuel)
• demonstration of links to hydrogen fuel cells
• compost material for local use.

Achieving environmental benefits from waste

The Mayor’s Municipal Waste Management Strategy sets out how the Mayor aims to shift London’s waste from a net contributor of climate change to a source of emissions savings. The Mayor’s emissions performance standard is a metric that considers the overall carbon impact of waste management activities and the carbon intensity floor sets the minimum CO2eq that can emitted from turning London’s local authority collected waste to energy.

The Greenhouse Gas Calculator (Excel) is a free tool that can be used to determine the emissions of an authority’s unique waste management solutions, based on WRATE lifecycle assessment methodology. The tool also calculates whether the option meets the Mayor’s emissions performance standard and carbon intensity floor:

• Greenhouse Gas Calculator (Excel)
• Greenhouse Gas Calculator manual (PDF)

Developing new waste management infrastructure

The Mayor is keen for London to retain the value of its waste by managing more of this material within the capital. The London Waste and Recycling Board (LWARB) manages a £73 million fund to assist the development of new waste management infrastructure in London. A list of LWARB’s infrastructure projects can be found at www.lwarb.gov.uk.

LWARB have also produced an online map of London’s waste sites and strategic industrial sites with potential for the development of new waste management facilities http://www.londonwastemap.org/