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Notes from Meetup #18: Waste Not, Want Not!

Notes from Meetup #18: Waste Not, Want Not!

Chris Dymond

Well it’s been quite a while since the last event, but hopefully this will have been the last SmartSheffield meetup to be held entirely remotely! And despite being online, it was an excellent event, held on the first day of the Sheffield Digital Festival and on a subject I’ve wanted to cover for a very long time: waste and energy recovery.

This edition was the last of the current run of SmartSheffield events, which started in September 2019, and was supposed to have completed in July last year - fear not though, as we are set to kick off a new season of meetups starting in September and hopefully be able to return to our regular bi-monthly schedule and host them in-person as well (although we’ll certainly look to stream them online too!).

Arup were the venue hosts for this event and while it would have been fantastic to return to their conference and café space in the heart of Sheffield City Centre, we again ran the event on the Airmeet platform in order to take advantage of its excellent Social Lounge feature, so our speakers and attendees could engage in conversation before and after the event.

Below are the talks from our four excellent speakers. I must also send huge thanks and commiserations to Karlind Govender from MAGICMILL in South Africa, who was set to speak as well, but tripped on stairs and seriously sprained his foot just an hour before the meetup started and was rushed to hospital! Hopefully he will be able to return at a future event to update us on his efforts to connect the waste and energy ecosystems in Cape Town and Sweden, and accelerate waste management development in Africa.

Karlind’s speaking time was not wasted, however, as it was successfully recycled when Professor Paul Hatton from the Sheffield School of Clinical Dentistry stepped in on incredibly short notice to tell us about a recent project at the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures that looked at single use plastics in medical waste. You can see and hear his talk below, along with our other speakers, Sophie Walker from Dsposal, Richard Bent from Veolia and Martha Hart from Arup.

Thanks once again to Neil Hooton, Victoria Odey, Derek Roberts and Tim Rutter from Arup, and all our other sponsors at Pitch-In, Creative Space Management and Sheffield Digital.

And a huge thanks to everyone who attended, we hope you had an engaging and informative experience - please let us know about it by filling in the short feedback form you should have received via email :)

And for those who weren’t able to attend on the day, here are all the talks:

Sophie Walker

“Can open data & digitalisation turn rubbish into resources?”

Sophie Walker is the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of waste data company Dsposal, and it’s sister social enterprise Your Dsposal. She is on a mission to “empower people to know what happens to their waste and make better decisions about it, bringing transparency and accountability to the waste supply chain.”

She explains how compex the journeys are that our waste goes on and the (often shocking) places it sometimes ends up, and the criminality that benefits from the current system. The lack of transparency is exacerbated by the prevalence of paper records and lack of digital audit trails. This state of affairs is often unwittingly supported by private and public sector administrators simply looking for the best prices. Dsposal’s objective is to foster so called “Passive Compliance”, whereby doing the right thing is also the easiest thing to do.

Collaboration is vital to this work, and Dsposal is now finding itself at the centre of a major digital transformation underway across the waste management ecosystem. In order to know where best to focus efforts and resources, it’s vital to know what waste is currently being handled by the industry, how much of it and how - and this data does not exist in any comprehensive form. Once this is known, and once people are able to recognise and treat a proportion of this waste as an asset instead of a burden, we as a nation will be on our way towards a far more ‘circular economy’. 

Data and data standards are key to this effort.

Sophie explains the scale of the problem, how Dsposal are approaching it and who they are collaborating with to build the tools and services required to bring this vision of the future about.

For more, please visit Dsposal’s website.

Prof Paul Hatton

“Single use plastics and packaging in healthcare: Challenges and Opportunities.”

Paul Hatton is a Professor of Biomaterials Science at the Sheffield School of Dentistry, and has been engaged with a project within the University's Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, and funded by the EPSRC, which looked at medical waste produced in a number of different medical contexts, including dentistry, vascular surgery and an orthopaedic unit. He and his colleagues are particularly interested in developing sustainable dentistry, and this project was connected to this broader mission.

Healthcare produces an enormous amount of waste, especially plastic waste, and very little of it is recycled or reused. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of this waste is clean and uncontaminated. More than 20% is plastic, 85% of that is non-hazardous and the majority of this plastic is made from recyclable polymers. This is a complex and highly controlled regulatory environment, and there are a range of challenges in design, procurement and practice that act as barriers to making this waste ecosystem more sustainable, which the project identified and Paul describes in some detail.

As well as describing the complexity of the system, the analysis also presents opportunities to make key changes which would transform the ways in which medical products can be made more sustainable and healthcare can transition towards a circular economy.

If anyone would like to get in touch about these issues, please visit the the Redefining Single Use Plastics research project at the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures:

Richard Bent

“Sheffield's low carbon district heating network"

Richard is a commercial manager for Veolia on Sheffield’s District Energy Scheme, and his talk provided us with an overview of the Energy Recovery Facility, which as Sheffielders will know, is just off Park Roundabout where the Parkway leaves the city centre and heads out towards Rotherham. Veolia won the contract to collect and manage Sheffield’s waste in 2001, and the ERF was constructed by Veolia as part of that contract, initially for the production of energy via a steam turbine - around 21MW which is sold to the national grid, and is also connected to Sheffield’s District Heating Network which distributes heat across Sheffield City Centre (around 42MW in the Winter, although the total capacity of the system is 60MW). Veolia’s contract with the city is set to run at least until 2038.

Richard then provides a history of the district heating network, the first parts of which were established in the 1970s, and now supplies 128 major buildings and residential complexes across the city, connected via 45km of piping that transports pressurised hot water at around 110 degrees Celsius. 

The carbon intensity of the network is only 0.08kg per kilowatt hour, as the energy is generated from the burning of waste rather than gas (which would produce around 0.184kg per kWh in a typical installation).

It’s one of the largest networks in the UK (possibly even the very largest), and converts over 235,000 tons of waste each year. Veolia are currently gathering readings at each connection point at half hourly intervals across the entire network, and are in the process of retrofitting a new sensor system which provide live data feeds across the network, which will allow an extra level of insight into the performance and operation.

Watch Richard’s talk for more information about the system, the geography of it, the data they gather and the services that are being offered. And if you would like more information, please see Veolia's Sheffield Heat Network website.

Martha Hart

“Leeds District Heating Network - How waste and data can help us decarbonise our heating.”

Martha is an Associate Energy Consultant at Arup in Sheffield, and has been instrumental in the development of the new district heating network in Leeds. Here she reviews her experience of designing the new facility and explains how waste and data need to work together to optimise waste and energy recovery systems to help decarbonise cities.

The incinerator in Leeds, called the RERF - the Recycling and Energy Recovery Facility, now processed 165,000 tons of waste per year, 20% of which is removed for recycling, and delivers 11.6MW of electricity to the national grid. The facility has been operating for a few years now, and was designed with heat capture in mind, and so the heat network that Martha has been designing is now coming on stream. 1,800 soclai housing units are now connected as well as several council buildings, and the network is being steadily built out from there.

Martha then explains how data has been used in the design. Procurement, construction and operation of the system. There’s still a lack of data and data standards in the industry, and so there is still much learning to be done to optimise designs, and operational data is now showing how inaccurate the design predictions were. Patterns of use are very different in different parts of the country, and different kinds of housing and demographics, with social housing for instance showing very different usage to professional households. 

As Martha also points out, the role of these systems is likely to increase as cities work to reduce their carbon footprints, and while some suggest that electricity is the way forward the existing gas networks carry three times more energy than the electricity network does, and so cannot simply be replaced without enormous investments in infrastructure. Therefore heat networks provide an important component of this wider transition that is underway.

If this data and insight were properly standardised and aggregated it would produce much better input data for future expansion and new networks in other cities. Open data standards are needed to provide proper context to the data that is available and which is now being produced by operating networks like the ones in Leeds and Sheffield.

If you would like to contact Martha please get in touch with Arup’s Sheffield Office.

Chris Dymond

SmartSheffield News for May 2021

As always, I presented the most recent smart city-related things that have crossed my radar recently, this month highlighting the following:

Please do get in touch if you have anything you would like me to share with the SmartSheffield community either at a future event, or via our mailing list and social media!

Email me at info@smartsheffield.city, or get in touch via Twitter @SmartSheffield.

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As I said, hopefully we’ll be back to a regular schedule from September onwards, and be able to hold events in person as well as broadcast over the Intertubes. Huge thanks once again to our excellent sponsors who have agreed to support us for the next season of events as well!

Have a fantastic summer, everyone, don't forget to sign up to the mailing list to be notified of future events at the SmartSheffield website, and we’ll see you for a new run in the Autumn :)

Chris Dymond - Unfolding

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