General Assembly of ERFO in Brussels

The ongoing progress in the process of standardisation of solid recovered fuels and the potential creation of an European trademark for fuels were two of several items at the GA assembly of ERFO at 14.06.07 kindly hosted by Holcim.

Memebers of ERFO from six countries joined to discuss progress the development of secondary fuels from non hazardous waste takes in Europe. The progress differs heavily from country to country.

Germany reports a significant increase in the use of SRF due to the complete landfill ban of 2005. In other countries stagnation is reported partly due to the fact, that a lot of material suitable for fuel prodiction can still be landfilled. As another potential threat the participants mentioned the very high subsidies partly given to the use of biomass as a fuel, while for SRF in several countries not even the biomass content is counted for Kyoto targets or subsidised in the same way.

ERFO will take this unbalanced policy as a main target for the future. "Not all actual ways of using biomass are really sustainable, some even lead either to disctruction of natural forests" was one of the critical arguments. The actual work on a biomass action plan and the renewal of the RES-E directive will be two important issues to work on.

ERFO is preparing a trademark for SRF in Europe, which will need to be used high quality standards and third party certification for the fuel produced and sold.

ERFO is also carefully following the discussion about the new waste framework directive, where especially the way the term "recovery" is defined, can leed to substantial market distortions. "We can live with the actual definition in the latest drafts of the council, but the discussions hae not yet reached a final step, and still also rather difficult definitions are thinkable".