Insights

Technical notes

Not a blog. These are reference notes on the questions that decide composite recovery projects and that are usually settled too late — written to be useful to someone preparing a specification, a permit application or an investment case, whether or not they ever engage RCA Engineering.

Note 01Contracts & specification

What a feedstock specification actually has to contain

In most composite recovery projects the feedstock specification is the shortest document in the file and the one that decides the outcome. It is usually written as a description of what the plant expects to receive. It needs to be written as an obligation about what the plant is entitled to reject.

The distinction is not academic. A specification drafted as a description creates a de facto obligation to accept whatever arrives, at a gate fee agreed before anyone measured the material. A specification drafted as an obligation puts the variability where it belongs: on the party that controls the stream.

The fields that carry the risk

Material composition, with ranges. Not “composite waste”. GFRP and CFRP fractions, resin system where known, core type, adhesive content, coating and gelcoat — each with a stated range rather than a nominal value.
Contamination limits by species. Ferrous and non-ferrous metal, timber, foam, soil, textile, residual fluids. A single aggregate percentage hides the species that actually damages the process.
Moisture and bulk density. Both drive throughput directly, and both are routinely quoted from the demonstration sample rather than from post-consumer material.
Piece size and presentation. Maximum dimension, whether pre-cut, how loaded, how delivered.
Prohibited items. Explicitly named, with the consequence of their presence stated rather than implied.
Sampling and testing. Method, frequency, who performs it, who pays, and what happens when the two parties disagree on a result.
Rejection and price adjustment. What triggers rejection, who bears the return cost, and how the gate fee moves when the material sits inside the envelope but at its worst edge.

A specification without a testing method and a rejection consequence is not a specification. It is a hope with a heading.

Note 02Regulatory

Recovery or disposal: the classification decides more than the permit

Two plants can run the same physical process on the same material and sit on opposite sides of the recovery/disposal line. The difference is not the equipment. It is what happens to the output, how efficiently the input is used, and whether the resulting material has a defined market and specification.

That classification then propagates through everything downstream. It determines the permit and its conditions, the reporting obligations, whether the output leaves the site as a product or as waste, and — the point clients most often discover late — whether the party sending the material can claim it has been recycled.

What to establish before the model is built

The intended classification, in the specific jurisdiction. Not the European framework in the abstract; the instrument as transposed and applied by the competent authority that will issue the permit.
End-of-waste criteria for the output. Whether they exist for this material, and if not, what case has to be made and to whom.
The output specification and its market. A recovered fraction with no specification and no buyer is a residue with a storage cost, whatever the process was called.
The client's own reporting need. What evidence the sending party requires to satisfy its obligations, and whether the plant can actually issue it.

This matters commercially because the gate fee a customer will pay is a function of what the customer can claim. A route that treats the material competently but cannot deliver a recycling claim competes on price with landfill alternatives — and loses the premium the whole case depended on.

Classification is not a permitting formality to be handled after the investment decision. It is an input to the revenue line.

Note 03Decommissioning

Five questions before signing for treatment capacity

An owner with a multi-year decommissioning programme needs something different from a waste contract. Available capacity and committed capacity are not the same instrument, and the difference only becomes visible in the year the programme peaks.

Is the capacity committed or merely available? A statement that the facility can process the material is not a reservation of throughput against your schedule. Ask what tonnage is contracted, in which years, and what it displaces.
What happens if the route becomes unavailable? Permit suspension, plant outage, technology failure or insolvency. Name the fallback, price it, and establish who carries the cost of using it.
What specification are you contracting to deliver? If the acceptance criteria are tighter than what your dismantling method actually produces, the exposure is a pre-treatment cost that appears after the contract is signed.
How does the price move? Indexation basis, review points, and what happens to the gate fee if the recovered-product market moves against the operator.
What evidence of treatment do you receive? Certificates, tonnages, destination of every fraction including residues — and whether that documentation satisfies the reporting your own obligations impose on you.

Each of these is a question about allocation of risk rather than about technology. That is generally the point at which a decommissioning programme stops being an operations exercise and becomes a contracting one.

Compliance on paper and capacity in reality are different purchases. Programmes fail on the second, not the first.

Published elsewhere

Writing in the trade press