Tom's Lantana-Fired Workshop Heater

One cold morning, Bill found Tom outside the workshop beside a large steel heater, three lengths of flue pipe and a collection of fittings that appeared to have been chosen by throwing magnets into a scrap heap.

Dog sat nearby, watching proceedings with professional suspicion.

“What’s that?” Bill asked.

“A lantana-fired workshop heater.”

Bill looked at the heater. Then he looked at the lantana covering the back gully.

“We’ve got plenty of that.”

“Exactly,” said Tom. “At present, lantana is a weed. This turns it into a resource.”

Tom explained that the heater would solve two problems at once. It would clear the lantana and heat the workshop. The lantana would no longer be wasted, the workshop would no longer be cold, and the farm would move decisively towards a circular economy.

Bill looked around for the circle but could only see several pieces of flue pipe lying in the dirt.

By lunchtime, the heater was connected. By three o’clock, Tom had lit the first load. By half past three, the workshop was warm, the flue was smoking only slightly, and Tom wore the satisfied expression of a man who had converted a weed problem into a laminated brochure.

“You see?” he said. “Useful heat from unwanted material.”

Bill held his hands towards the heater.

“Works well.”

“And every load we burn is lantana that won’t spread.”

Dog appeared carrying a length of lantana twice as long as himself. It caught in the doorway, turned him sideways and swept a tin of bolts off the bench.

Tom extracted the branch and added it to the pile.

“Even Dog understands the system.”

Over the following months, Tom attacked the lantana with enormous enthusiasm. He cut it from the gully, dragged it out from under the trees and stacked it beneath an old machinery awning to dry.

The heater worked beautifully. Tom recorded every load burned and every patch cleared. He calculated the firewood avoided, estimated the value of the recovered heat and produced a graph showing a strong relationship between declining lantana cover and rising workshop comfort.

Bill could not fault the result.

The gully looked better. The workshop was warm. Dog became remarkably skilled at dragging lantana to the shed, although his understanding of suitable branch length remained poor.

By the end of the second winter, most of the nearby lantana was gone.

Tom had also improved the heater. He installed a larger firebox, an automatic feed chute and a fan that made the workshop sound like a small aircraft preparing to leave without them. He built a drying shed and bought a machine that chopped lantana into pieces of precisely the size the heater preferred.

The workshop changed as well. Tom now used the heat for drying timber, warming paint and keeping several pieces of equipment at what he called an “efficient operating temperature.”

One afternoon, Bill found him studying a map of the farm.

“We’re getting short,” Tom said.

“Of what?”

“Lantana.”

Bill looked towards the back gully. Native grass was returning where the thickets had been.

“I thought that was the point.”

“It was the original point. But we’ve got to consider continuity of fuel supply.”

Tom collected the remaining lantana from along the boundary fence. Then he cleared a patch beside the old stock route. When that was gone, he brought in two trailer loads from a neighbour.

The neighbour was delighted.

Tom described the arrangement as regional weed recovery.

The following winter, Bill noticed a new fence around the last substantial patch on the farm. A sign had been wired to the gate.

> STRATEGIC LANTANA RESERVE

> AUTHORISED ACCESS ONLY

Inside the fence, the lantana was flourishing.

Tom had watered it.

Bill found him spreading fertiliser around the larger plants.

“What are you doing?”

“Managing the reserve.”

“You’re fertilising lantana.”

“Only to maintain future supply.”

Bill looked at the sign, the carefully tended plants and the weed-control notice still attached to the workshop wall.

“I thought the heater was supposed to eliminate it.”

“It is eliminating it.”

“You’re growing it.”

“That’s a separate part of the operation.”

Dog appeared beneath the bottom wire. He sniffed around the reserve, selected a young lantana plant and pulled it out by the roots.

Tom lunged across the enclosure.

“Drop it!”

Dog, delighted by the sudden interest, ran.

Tom chased him twice around the reserve before Dog returned voluntarily and dropped the plant beside the heater’s fuel pile.

Tom picked it up carefully.

“That one wasn’t ready.”

He carried it back inside the fence, replanted it and pressed the soil around its roots.

Bill watched the entire operation.

“Dog seems to think lantana still belongs in the heater.”

“He doesn’t understand supply management.”

“He understands weed control.”

“There will always be lantana somewhere,” Tom said. “We’re never going to eliminate all of it.”

“Maybe not,” said Bill. “But there’s a difference between accepting that some will remain and needing enough of it to keep your workshop running.”

“We can scale the operation up or down depending on supply.”

“What happens when you scale it down?”

“The workshop gets cold, the timber doesn’t dry, the equipment doesn’t stay warm and we can’t recover the cost of the new feed system.”

“So it can scale down.”

“Exactly.”

“It just can’t keep doing what you built it to do.”

Tom frowned. This was not how scalability had appeared in the brochure.

Dog returned to the replanted lantana and pulled it out again.

This time Tom snatched it from him before he reached the heater.

“The heater wasn’t a bad idea,” Bill said. “It gave us useful heat and helped clear the farm.”

“Exactly.”

“But then you built the workshop around it. Getting rid of the lantana stopped being a success and became a fuel-supply problem.”

Tom looked at the heater.

Then at the drying shed.

Then at the fertilised strategic reserve.

Dog sat beside him, waiting to see whether they were still eliminating lantana or had moved into farming it.

“The question used to be how to get rid of the stuff,” Bill said. “Now the question is how to secure enough of it.”

Tom looked down at the plant in his hands.

Dog reached forward and pulled off a branch.

Bill nodded towards him.

“He’s the only one still following the original plan.”

What Bill learned

Using an existing problem like lantana (or non-recyclable waste) can be sensible.

Building a system that needs the problem is something else.

The heater did not fail. It worked so well that Tom invested in a larger system around it. Once he did that, lantana changed from something he wanted to eliminate into something he had to secure, protect and eventually grow.

Dog understood none of the economics.

He just kept pulling out the weeds.

When circularity starts running backwards

The Glan Devon project proposes to solve a waste problem by creating a business that needs the waste. This is absurd.

It would use non-recyclable waste as the fuel for a business intended to operate into the future. At the project boundary, this looks circular. Burn one difficult waste stream to provide the heat needed to dry another, then turn the dried biosolids into fertiliser. Waste goes in. A saleable product comes out. But circularity is supposed to reduce our dependence on waste—not make the continued production of waste necessary.

The proposed process would turn non-recyclable waste, or NRW, from something society should eliminate into something the plant needs. Once capital, jobs, contracts and operations depend upon it, a reduction in NRW is no longer an uncomplicated environmental success. It can become a fuel shortage, an underused asset and a threat to the business.

The waste does not merely have somewhere to go. It has somewhere that needs it.

“Non-recyclable” is not a law of nature

Most NRW is not inherently unavoidable. It is non-recyclable within the system we currently have. The project itself defines NRW as material that cannot be economically reprocessed into new products “using current technology”. Those words matter. They tell us that the classification depends upon present technology, prices, product design, collection systems, markets and regulation. Change those things and some of today’s NRW may disappear.

A multilayer package may be impossible to recycle through the current system. That does not mean the package had to be designed that way. A product may be cheaper to replace than repair. That does not make the resulting waste inevitable. It means our present economic arrangements reward one choice over another.

“Unavoidable waste” therefore often means waste that cannot be avoided without changing something important upstream.

That is precisely what a genuine circular economy should be trying to do.

Instead, the Glan Devon concept takes the current waste stream as a given and builds another system around it. The logic then begins to run backwards:

1. The present system produces NRW.

2. Because it presently produces NRW, that waste is treated as unavoidable.

3. Infrastructure is built that needs NRW.

4. Reducing NRW threatens the infrastructure.

5. The existence of the infrastructure becomes another reason for NRW to continue.

That is not the elimination of waste. It is the institutionalisation of it.

The business would see a feedstock, not a failure

Investment changes what NRW means to the organisation.

Before the plant exists, the sensible question is:

> How can we prevent this waste from being created?

After the plant exists, ordinary business survival pushes a different question:

> How do we secure enough suitable feedstock to keep operating?

No conspiracy is required. No allegation of bad faith is required. A business is expected to protect its investment, retain its staff, meet its contracts and remain viable. If continued operation depends upon a supply of NRW, then the business has a perfectly normal reason to protect that supply. Waste prevention can then look like feedstock risk. Better recycling can look like competition. Product redesign can threaten fuel availability. New recovery technology can strand existing equipment.

The business may still support waste reduction in principle. But its survival would be tied to society not reducing this particular waste stream too far or too quickly.

That conflict is built into the system.

This is a recognised circular-economy problem Many others have identified the same structural problem.

The OECD has warned that capital-intensive waste-to-energy facilities are pushed towards high utilisation, can lock in incineration for years and may compete with recycling for material. The European Commission has similarly warned that excessive waste-to-energy capacity can create stranded assets and obstruct prevention, reuse and recycling.

Queensland’s own waste hierarchy places avoidance, reduction, reuse and recycling above energy recovery. That hierarchy becomes incoherent if infrastructure built at the lower level depends upon society failing to achieve the outcomes above it.

Nor is “better than landfill” an adequate answer. It compares two destinations for a fixed quantity of waste and assumes that quantity will continue. The more important question is whether we should accept that waste stream as permanent at all.

Using NRW for energy may be preferable to landfilling some existing material. That does not make long-lived dependence on NRW a circular solution.

“There will always be NRW” is not an answer

There may always be some NRW. That does not justify building a long-lived business around the volume, composition and energy value of the NRW produced by today’s system.

The claim confuses the possible existence of a residual with the continued availability of a suitable industrial feedstock. It tells us nothing about how much NRW will exist, what it will contain, where it will be produced or whether it will reliably provide the heat the plant needs over its operating life.

More importantly, it treats the future waste stream as something that simply happens to us. It does not. The future waste stream is partly something society chooses.

Long-term aspirations, targets and standards are among the main drivers of change across the waste system. They reshape product design, packaging, repairability, producer responsibility, collection, sorting, recycling technology and markets for recovered materials. A material that appears non-recyclable today can be redesigned, prohibited, separated differently or made commercially recoverable tomorrow.

Those goals are not predictions that change will occur by itself. They are instructions to governments, businesses and researchers about the change they are expected to create.

Queensland’s Energy from Waste Policy makes this exact point. It says the quantity and composition of residual waste are expected to change as waste-reduction and recycling targets are pursued and waste is progressively designed out. It therefore requires proponents to demonstrate how their facility will adapt to those changes over its expected lifetime.

Australia’s Circular Economy Framework sets a national ambition to double circularity by 2035, shrink the material footprint per person by 10 per cent and recover 80 per cent of resources. The National Waste Policy Action Plan separately aims to reduce waste generated per person by 10 per cent by 2030 and continue phasing out problematic and unnecessary plastics. Europe is pursuing the same upstream logic through product-design, repair and packaging rules intended to prevent waste before it exists.

Whether every target will be met is not the point. The direction is clear: the waste system is supposed to change, and long-lived infrastructure should be compatible with that change.

Using NRW as fuel is therefore a downstream treatment for a problem created upstream. It may relieve the immediate disposal pressure, but it does not address why the waste exists. In that sense it is a Band-Aid, not a cure.

A Band-Aid can be useful while a wound heals. The logic becomes absurd when the business built around the Band-Aid needs the wound to remain open.

The proper long-term question is not whether there will still be some NRW. It is whether we should create a new commercial dependency on NRW while simultaneously claiming that our goal is to prevent, redesign and recover as much of it as possible.

A simple test exposes the problem

The project should be judged against one simple question:

> If the supply of NRW fell rapidly because prevention, redesign and recycling succeeded, would that be a success for the facility—or a crisis?

If it would be a crisis, the problem has become embedded in the solution.

A genuinely transitional facility would be designed to lose its NRW feedstock. It would be able to reduce, replace or eliminate that fuel without disabling the biosolids process. Its commercial model would reward declining NRW use. Its contracts would not guarantee minimum waste volumes. Its success would progressively make part of the facility unnecessary.

That would look materially different from an ordinary business built around continuing throughput.

The Glan Devon proposal may be able to divert waste from landfill, produce heat and manufacture a saleable fertiliser. Those claims must be assessed on their evidence. But none of them removes the central contradiction:

> We are being asked to call a system “circular” because it finds a productive use for NRW, even though that use creates a new reason for NRW to keep existing.

Coupling two waste streams is not necessarily circularity. Sometimes it is simply mutual dependence dressed in circular language.

The planning question is therefore larger than whether the plant can meet an emissions limit or its fertiliser can meet a product specification.

It is whether we should approve infrastructure that helps society escape from non-recyclable waste—or infrastructure that will eventually need society to keep producing it.

References

1. Glan Devon Bio-Fertiliser Project — project description and glossary (https://www.gdbp.com.au/)

2. Queensland Government — Energy from Waste Policy (https://www.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/118433/energy-from-waste-policy.pdf)

3. OECD — Global Plastics Outlook: Economic Drivers, Environmental Impacts and Policy Options (https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/global-plastics-outlook_de747aef-en.html)

4. European Commission — The role of waste-to-energy in the circular economy (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX%3A52017DC0034)

5. Australian Government — Australia’s Circular Economy Framework (https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/protection/circular-economy/framework)

6. Australian Government — National Waste Policy Action Plan (https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/protection/waste/publications/national-waste-policy-action-plan)

7. European Commission — Circular Economy Action Plan (https://environment.ec.europa.eu/strategy/circular-economy_en)

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