best available technologies for manure treatment - Baltic Green Belt

Best Available Technologies for manure treatment baltic sea 2020
3: INFORMATION GATHERED
3.3: Community plants for livestock
manure treatment
Technologies that are not stand-alone technologies
and/or have clear economies of scale would typically
have an advantage of being implemented via farmer
cooperations or a service provider as off-farm manure
treatment plants.
• Technologies that cannot stand alone would often
be part of rather complex and high-tech solutions
that would be complicated for farmers to handle
along with their key production.
• Technologies with a clear economy of scale, i.e.
where treatment of a small amount per year is
more costly than treatment of a large amount per
year, see for instance Birkmose (2006), would
often be too costly for farms of average sizes to
invest in and to operate.
Examples of these cases are livestock manure treatment
plants, where pig slurry is converted to purified
water and different commercial/mineral fertilisers, for
instance nitrification-denitrification plants as seen in
Spain, Holland and Belgium, purification plants as
seen in Holland, or centralised biogas plants as seen
in Denmark.
Further, it is important for farms to handle risks
associated with their business, and the larger investments
they make in relation to their turnover, the
more vulnerable are they to changes in the markets,
regulations and other external factors.
Remarks given by participants at the Roundtable
discussion on 29 September generally expressed the
opinion, that the project could promote larger community
livestock manure treatment plants for combined
technologies. This would take away the structural
development pressure on pig producers, which would
be a result in itself in relation to the environmental
load of pig production. The rationale behind the
remarks is that the structural development in the
livestock production is forced by the legislative burden
on the producers, which more rationally can be dealt
with by the large production units than the smaller
ones. Furthermore, if the legislative burden enforces
use of specific technologies, then the economy of scale
of the technology would force the smallest producers
to go out of the market. It is also of importance for
many pig producers to develop their competences on
animal husbandry, and to source out other activities, as
for instance livestock manure treatment. Therefore, by
encouraging the livestock manure treatment technologies
as community plant solutions, would avoid an
extra pressure for livestock farms for growing bigger in
order to survive. The extra transport of slurry to and
from a community plant would typically be balanced
by advantages of a more rational slurry handling,
increased value of the slurry etc. within a certain radius
from the community plant.
Additionally it should also be kept in mind that
a major challenge with an environmentally sound
disposal of the livestock manure is to distribute it at
sufficiently large areas of agricultural land, as visualised
in tables 1 to 4. Therefore, a major advantage
of community plants are actually, that they in reality
functions as centres for regional re-distribution of
livestock manures, meaning that the logistics around
the collection of pig slurry and distribution of treated
manure ensures the distribution to for instance specialised
plant producers without livestock production
in the region. See also www.biovakka.fi.
However, the off-farm livestock manure treatment
plants are actually moving the livestock manure treatment
from being a regulated issue to a non-regulated
issue, at least in some cases. The IPPC directive does
not, via the Annex 1 list of installations that needs
environmental approvals, comprise off-farm livestock
manure treatment.
Off-farm livestock manure treatment plants should
be listed in Annex 1 of the IPPC Directive as installations
that require environmental approval because the
deployed technologies have environmental impacts in
general, and on N and P leaching in specific.
3.4: Efficiency of BAT dissemination in
relation to the IPPC Directive
The following sections give a presentation of the
information gathered about the IPPC Directive,
how the administration of it is organised, and of the
BREF document.
Additionally, reference is given to the annexes
C and J with lists of people met and memorandum
from roundtable discussion.
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