Refuse-derived fuel and the cement kiln

A cement kiln runs its flame at around 2,000 degrees and its clinker at 1,450, with a long residence time and an alkaline atmosphere that captures acid gases in the product. It is the one industrial furnace that can burn mixed waste cleanly without a dedicated flue-gas treatment plant, and the environment department has permitted it to do so, under conditions, since 2010. The fuel is refuse-derived fuel: waste sorted, shredded and dried to a specification the kiln can feed.

Compiled in September 2026 from the releases of the time, with the revisions the agencies have published since. Nothing here is a forecast.

What the fuel is

The high-calorific fraction of municipal or industrial waste: plastics, paper, textiles, wood, with the metals, glass and wet organics removed. Shredded to a size the burner can handle and dried to below 20% moisture, it has a heating value of 15 to 20 megajoules a kilogram, comparable to a poor coal. The chlorine content, mostly from PVC, is the specification that matters, because the kiln's bypass has a limit.

Why the kiln wants it

Coal is most of a cement plant's variable cost, and every tonne of fuel it replaces is a tonne it does not import. Plants in Europe run at substitution rates above 50%; Philippine plants had reached a fraction of that by 2025 and were adding pre-processing capacity to raise it. The kiln is paid twice: once in the coal it does not buy and once in the fee for taking the waste.

Where the waste comes from

Since 2022 large companies have had to recover their plastic packaging, and a cement kiln taking refuse-derived fuel is a recognised recovery route. That obligation is the supply chain: producer responsibility organisations pay collectors, collectors deliver to a pre-processing plant, and the plant sells fuel to the kiln. Before the law, the material had no buyer; after it, the material has a price.

The plant in the middle

The pre-processing facility, which sorts, shreds and dries, is the project. It is smaller and cheaper than a waste-to-energy power plant, it needs no turbine and no grid connection, and it sells to a customer that already exists. For a private landfill operator or an industrial park with a waste stream, it is the first waste-to-energy project to look at.

The private landfills page sets out where such a facility sits in a landfill operation.

We take a waste-to-energy plant from the feasibility study through delivery and into operation. Tell us about the site and the waste.