ABSTRACT
Biochar is one of the most intriguing ideas to have emerged in the maelstrom of thinking and dialogue surrounding climate change and carbon reduction in the past two decades. European societies and economies generate large quantities of biodegradable waste including food waste, sewage sludge (SSW), manures and slurries. The formal policy for reducing the quantities of such wastes called the waste hierarchy' has been reduce, re-use and recycle, in that order. Pyrolysis equipment could be operated as a cost-effective means of treating waste and converting it into a useful product, if so-called end-of-waste criteria can be achieved. Revenues are temperature and scale dependent, with a premium on treating SSW at larger scale and higher temperatures. Carbon markets' refers to a range of mandatory and voluntary markets which allow trade in carbon emission units. The Kyoto Protocol (KP) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted by Parties in 1997 and entered into force in 2005.
