- Refuse-derived fuel (RDF) — conglomerated waste often composed of up to 50% plastic — is being burned globally in waste-to-energy incinerators, cement kilns, paper mills, and by other industries.
- Proponents say RDF reduces fossil fuel use and produces cleaner energy, while diverting waste from landfills.
- Critics say a lack of monitoring often hides RDF’s true environmental and human health footprint, and that when burned alongside fossil fuels, the technology can significantly worsen pollution. Health issues potentially connected to RDF contaminants range from cancer to hormone disruption.
- That’s a major concern as RDF ramps up, with countries in the Global South especially starting to use and dispose of waste in this way. Burning RDF and the incineration of plastic waste has been linked to greenhouse gas emissions and also extremely toxic pollutants such as dioxins.
As the world desperately searches for a way out of its global climate change and plastic pollution crises, nations are increasingly turning to burning municipal waste to make fuel as a solution to both problems.
One approach, dubbed refuse-derived fuel (RDF), processes, packages and burns conglomerated combustible organic waste with large amounts of potentially hazardous plastics in order to make fuel to produce heat or electricity. RDF is an escalating global trend causing concern among environmental experts due to its potential climate, pollution and human health impacts.
RDF is typically made up of around 50% plastic waste, which is combined with other combustible materials like wood, cardboard and textiles. The mixed waste is processed via drying and shredding, with the resulting materials then burned in so-called waste-to-energy incinerators, cement kilns, or other industrial facilities such as paper mills.
Proponents argue that burning waste is an effective way to simultaneously reduce landfilling and plastic pollution, while cutting greenhouse gas emissions, as it’s a substitute for fossil fuels. Advocates have even marketed RDF as a circular economy solution.
Critics aren’t convinced. They say that incinerating RDFs, with their high plastic content, is akin to swapping out one dirty fuel source for another, resulting in the release of significant greenhouse gases, along with harmful particulate and chemical pollutants, including dioxins, a potential byproduct of burning plastics.
“Our concerns about [RDF] relate to the fact that plastic consists of polymers that are mixed with many, many different chemicals,” says Lee Bell, technical and policy adviser at the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN), an NGO.
More than 4,000 chemicals found in plastics are of concern due to their persistent, bioaccumulative, and/or toxic properties, and it’s becoming clear that plastic pollution is a human health concern. “If you burn RDF, you generate a whole range of toxic emissions,” Bell says. “The creation of Refuse-Derived Fuel, which is a plastic-based fuel, is also a way of avoiding more sound management options.”
Climate change solution or not?
RDF is part of the larger waste-to-energy (WTE) renewable energy sector. RDF technology was developed in the U.S. in the 1970s, and grew slowly for decades, remaining relatively small scale.
That has changed of late, with the global RDF market expected to more than double in value — expanding from $5.4 billion in 2025 to $11.7 billion by 2035. Europe dominates the RDF market today, with the Asia-Pacific region now seeing rapid growth, and the Middle East following behind.
According to the Europe-based RDF Industry Group, Europe imports and exports around 6.5 million metric tons of RDF annually (though this figure doesn’t account for domestic production and incineration). Proponents are calling RDF “the industrial answer to a global waste crisis.”
But research by IPEN suggests RDF is a growing environmental and public health concern, with production and incineration on the rise in the Global South, particularly Asia. Major worries: A lack of standardized environmental regulation, inconsistent fuel quality control, and inadequate pollution controls, particularly in developing nations.
“Taking waste that otherwise would be landfilled and incinerating it for energy is a good thing, but only after all of the material [such as metals and glass] that can sensibly be recycled has been taken out of it,” says Mike Brown, co-founder and director of Rooted Environmental, a consultancy and part of the RDF Industry Group secretariat.
RDF proponents like the RDF Industry Group say it reduces greenhouse gas emissions, though it appears to do so using a carbon accounting loophole also used by the forest biomass industry: While RDF’s biomass components (wood, paper and cardboard) do add significant carbon to the atmosphere, contributing to climate change when burned, those emissions often aren’t counted by countries because the burning of biomass is classified by United Nations rules as carbon neutral, since trees can eventually be regrown. But nature does count those emissions, which do add to near-term climate change.
Industry advocates also argue that RDF avoids emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, because burning it reduces the amount of waste going into landfills, which emit large amounts of methane to the atmosphere.
Both these carbon arguments have led to RDF being touted as a low-carbon solution, and even “zero-carbon,” for industry. The RDF Industry Group, for example, said the volumes of imported and exported waste-derived fuels in the EU prevented the release of an estimated 83.7 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent from 2015-2024.
Brown argues that while reducing, recycling and reusing waste is ultimately the ideal environmental solution, incinerating it is still beneficial. “The primary reason for [burning RDF] isn’t because it’s a low carbon fuel generating low carbon energy,” he says. “The primary reason is because it’s better than the alternative of landfill.”
RDF’s global growth raises questions
The cement industry is a major user of RDF — replacing fossil fuels, or burning it alongside them and other alternative fuels, such as used tires, which poses a thorny toxic disposal problem. Industry bodies such as the Global Cement and Concrete Association (GCCA) promote RDF as part of the industry’s global decarbonization efforts. Producing cement and concrete currently accounts for around 8% of global carbon emissions.
According to the GCCA, its members — comprising around 25% of global operators — convert about 35 million metric tons of waste to fuel each year; roughly half of which is RDF. It’s estimated that around 5 million to 6 million metric tons of RDF are currently used in Europe’s cement industry, with an eventual potential rise to 15 million metric tons annually.
“Every ton of waste we use in our kilns is a ton of fossil fuels we don’t have to use,” says GCCA executive director Thomas Guillot. “It is embedded in our roadmap, in our vision for the decarbonization of the cement industry … We want to develop and to multiply these solutions at the regional level. Achieving the [cement industry] decarbonisation agenda implies, certainly doubling the amount of waste used in the next five years.”
This drive to produce and incinerate RDF is leading to expansion of facilities across the globe, sometimes in nations lacking strong environmental regulation. Its use is now well established in India and China, and projected to grow elsewhere in the developing world.
RDF was introduced in India to tackle a growing landfill and dumpsite problem, says Anubha Aggarwal, an analyst with the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). “In my view, this is a resource … [that] can replace coal in cement plants.”
Indonesia is pushing forward with an RDF production facility in North Jakarta capable of processing up to 2,500 metric tons of waste per day into around 875 metric tons of RDF. But a recent trial run of that plant was halted due to air pollution concerns.
RDF exports from the Global North to the Global South have especially raised concerns over “waste colonialism.” In Nigeria, the NGO Sustainable Research and Action for Environmental Development has flagged the government’s decision to accept “non-hazardous” waste from the European Union, including RDF, as “deeply troubling.”
IPEN says wealthy nations are using RDF’s green claims as a means of circumventing the Basel Convention on the transnational shipment of hazardous materials, and particularly as a way to quietly move toxic plastic waste to the Global South. “Currently we can’t actually see where it’s moving and how much of it is moving,” says IPEN’s Bell.
RDF raises serious pollution questions
Claims that RDF can reduce emissions are strongly questioned by critics and dubbed “creative accounting” by Janek Vähk, the zero pollution policy manager at Zero Waste Europe. “The problem … is that there are very few studies looking at the actual emissions,” he says.
A 2024 paper found that substituting RDF as an alternative fuel in Europe’s cement industry results in “relatively small climate benefits” due to its fossil fuel content (including petrochemical-based plastics). Currently, the continent’s cement industry substitutes around 52% of the thermal energy required with alternative fuels, including RDF.
A recent report by Global Efficiency Intelligence, an NGO, found that using municipal waste as an alternative fuel in cement manufacturing results in only “marginal” greenhouse gas emissions savings at best. But carbon releases are just the “tip of the iceberg” when compared to potential emissions of toxic chemicals, says Veena Singla, who is part of the program on reproductive health and the environment at the University of California, San Francisco.
“There’s not much evidence … that burning alternative fuels is better for pollution. Maybe that’s the case if you’re just talking about greenhouse gasses and only at the burning phase,” Singla says. “But we’re concerned about far more than greenhouse gasses when you’re considering the health of people near the site, the communities, and the long-term impacts of the chemicals generated.”
Studies by IPEN, and other organizations sampling chicken eggs around waste incinerators and industrial facilities burning mixed plastic waste found widespread, high levels of hazardous dioxin contamination. Dioxins, among the most toxic of synthetic contaminants known, are formed when plastics and certain flame-retardant chemicals are burned.
Similar research by Zero Waste Europe found contamination by persistent organic pollutants near waste incinerators and cement kilns in European countries. These pollutants include dioxins, heavy metals and PFAS, and are linked to health impacts ranging from heart disease to cancer and hormone disruption.
Some of the chemicals being emitted from burn sites, such as PFAS, “are reproductive and developmental toxicants, so they can increase the risks of developmental issues when foetuses are exposed in utero, and can cause reproductive problems like trouble getting pregnant, trouble maintaining pregnancies, and low birth weight babies,” Singla adds.
“It’s … going to grow as a problem in the Global South, because they just don’t have the resources to conduct regular [RDF emissions] enforcement and monitoring, particularly for the really nasty chemicals like dioxins and furans that are produced when you burn plastic waste,” Bell says. “It really sets back the cause of both limiting toxic pollution and carbon pollution by going down this route.”
Aggarwal from CREA, though positive on RDF’s outlook, agrees that burning mixed waste cleanly is a “major challenge.” She notes that, “Mixed waste can lead to composition of emissions we may not even be equipped to control at a cement plant.”
The pollution issue is particularly acute with co-incineration, when alternative fuels like RDF are mixed with fossil fuels, which can increase emissions of both greenhouse gases and pollutants, say critics.
“Cement kilns typically have minimal air pollution controls and are not designed to handle the heterogeneous nature of waste,” says Neil Tangri, science and policy director at the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, an NGO. “So, we would expect a much larger range of toxic emissions, such as dioxins and furans, brominated and fluorinated PAHs.”
Guillot from the GCCA, however, says claims that the cement industry’s use of RDF and other waste results in the release of harmful chemicals and pollutants is “completely wrong.” Rather, he argues, pollution is due to the form of incineration used, particularly burning at high temperatures exceeding 1,000° Celsius (1,832° Fahrenheit). “There is absolutely no direct link between adverse emission and the usage of waste,” he says. “On the contrary. I mean, we are rather sanitizing the place.”
The need for RDF regulation
In Australia, thousands of tons of RDF, known there as process engineered fuels, is being exported to Asian nations to burn as fuel, stirring controversy. This led in 2022 to Australia requiring these shipments to receive hazardous waste permits and be tracked due to plastic content. Since then, two shipments have been recorded to Japan, each totaling 12,000 metric tons. Prior to the legislation, the volume of RDF shipped or its destination wasn’t known, Bell says.
Australia’s legislated move to track and trace RDF is a good example of what Bell’s organization wants to see globally. The NGO is calling for specific export codes for RDF under the Basel Convention, including designation as hazardous waste due to plastic content. He says he hopes the issue will be raised at the next Basel Convention meeting in June 2026.
“We would like to see Refuse-Derived Fuel prohibited altogether, because we think it’s an environmentally unsound management of plastic waste,” Bell says. “But at the minimum, what the Basel Convention could do is apply those codes so at least it can be tracked, and at least countries know what they’re getting. And it can’t be shipped to developing countries that don’t have the capacity to manage it properly.”
RDF production and its incineration are likely to remain a small fraction of the total amount of waste burned for fuel or energy by industry, say experts. Nonetheless, its global growth is problematic due to its limited greenhouse gas emission reductions and potentially harmful localized pollution impacting nearby communities.
Singla notes that when nations and companies pursue industrial waste incineration and RDF, they do little to limit plastic production or incentivize other circular solutions, such as recycling and reuse. Others say the cement sector and other industries should be pursuing alternative energy sources, such as clean hydrogen.
“We can have truly circular and healthy systems that are not transferring pollution and impacts onto other communities,” Singla says. “We just need to make sure we’re putting our attention and investment in the right solutions that are the least polluting, the least toxic, and don’t increase demand for fossil fuels, ultimately, by burning plastics and burning waste.”
Banner image: Smoke rises from a coal-burning power plant. Refuse-derived fuel (RDF), which includes large amounts of plastics, is replacing fossil fuels in some energy and industrial furnaces. But critics say this practice is merely replacing one dirty fuel for another. Image by Greenpeace Switzerland via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
Citations:
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Cavalett, O., Watanabe, M. D., Voldsund, M., Roussanaly, S., & Cherubini, F. (2024). Paving the way for sustainable decarbonization of the European cement industry. Nature Sustainability, 7(5), 568-580. doi:10.1038/s41893-024-01320-y
Rickard, B. P., Rizvi, I., & Fenton, S. E. (2022). Per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and female reproductive outcomes: PFAS elimination, endocrine-mediated effects, and disease. Toxicology, 465, 153031. doi:10.1016/j.tox.2021.153031
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