A Fijian engineer with international infrastructure experience has urged the Government to pause and rethink a proposed large-scale waste-to-energy plant, arguing the project as currently conceived is mismatched to Fiji’s waste profile and could undermine national planning and climate goals.
Dobui Tukana, a Tier 1 engineer based in the United Arab Emirates who has worked on major projects in the United Kingdom and the Middle East, said the proposal by The Next Generation — which has attracted both strong support and sharp criticism over the past month — illustrates a wider problem of pushing through complex projects without adequate technical appraisal or sequential consent. “We are seeing a pattern across Fiji, from the rivers of Macuata to the shores of Vuda. Projects are being pushed through without following the proper sequence of consent and technical appraisal,” he said, warning this erodes public trust and weakens protections for landowners and communities.
Tukana’s central technical objection is the scale of the plant being proposed. He highlighted data showing Fiji generates about 200,000 tonnes of waste each year, while an 80-megawatt waste-to-energy facility would need roughly 900,000 tonnes of waste to operate at optimal capacity. “To make it ‘viable’ for a developer, a plant of that scale would require roughly 900,000 tonnes of fuel. This gap forces a commercial necessity to import 700,000 tonnes of foreign waste. That isn’t efficiency, it’s an ‘Import Trap’,” he said. He recommended a smaller 15–20MW plant that would better align with domestic waste availability, even if that size reduces some commercial economies of scale.
Beyond fuel supply, Tukana warned the project could conflict with Fiji’s 2035 target to reach 100 percent renewable energy. He noted that large waste-to-energy plants typically enter long-term power purchase agreements of up to 30 years and operate as baseload generators that are difficult to ramp down. Those contractual and operational features, he argued, risk locking the power system into continuous combustion of waste — including carbon-intensive plastics — and could limit the flexibility needed to integrate more variable renewable sources such as solar and wind.
Tukana also identified a “structural governance gap” in Fiji’s preparedness to manage Tier 1 infrastructure. He said advanced digital standards widely used on major projects internationally — Building Information Modelling (BIM) Level 2 and Digital Twin systems — are not yet mandated in Fiji’s procurement frameworks. “While our local engineers are brilliant, they haven’t been given the ‘technical theater’ to practice these specific thermal-integration skills on this scale,” he said, calling for compulsory technology transfer and mentorship clauses for international partners.
Environmental and community concerns raised during ongoing Government consultations add urgency to the debate. Resort managers in the Western Division, including those from Outrigger resorts, have warned of potential impacts on water quality. Fiji’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Filipo Tarakinikini, has also publicly questioned the project’s long-term health and environmental implications. Tukana has called for clearer environmental benchmarking in consultations, citing international standards such as the EU’s Industrial Emissions Directive and UK waste management rules as points of reference.
The Government is continuing public consultations with communities it considers “affected.” Tukana’s intervention frames the project as a test of Fiji’s national planning and procurement systems: he urges either scaling the proposal to match domestic waste streams or strengthening technical, environmental and contractual safeguards before any long-term commitments are signed.