Mott's Blog

Note: A shorter version of this post will appear as an article in ReSource Magazine (South Africa).      Discussions of hazardous waste in Africa all come down to the same issue: how to get from an essentially unregulated situation to a well-regulated system with adequate commercial waste management capacity.   In some ways, the prevalence of open dumping of municipal wastes mask a possibly larger problem. As rules tighten, the incentives to avoids or ignore the rules grows. The plethora of new hazardous wastes rules in Africa creates huge incentives for non-compliance. These incentives reach a crisis level when there are few or no legal alternatives within many African countries and the ability to export the waste to better facilities in other African countries is overly restrictive. We will likely find that the literal mountains of municipal waste in open dumps have provided a low-cost – if illegal – option for hazardous waste dumping. Vast territory and li...

You always hate to say later that your dire prediction was correct. Few folks get credos for being the bearers of bad news. But when the auction mechanism was introduced in Poland and the EU a few years ago, many of us predicted that it would impact RES investment in a serious manner. And not for the good. Ther auction requires projects be permitted and approved and have complete designs and building permits (which in Poland are vastly more detailed than in many other countries). The front-end requirements are serious and more serious for smaller projects, where they are a larger percent of the total investment. Having cleared those hurdles, you are left with waiting for the auction and then going to construction. The period after the auction to build varies with the type of project, but it is considerable. The financial support for the project needs to be obviously closed in this period, it cannot be closed prior to the auction except in general terms. So we have delays for pr...