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LANDFILL NOV / D E C 2 0 0 8
Landfill brought back from the brink By Garth Lamb IT’S A sure sign Sydney airspace is more valuable than ever when a willing buyer can be found for a poorly run dump that has caused headaches for its neighbours and been closed down by the EPA for a string of non-compliance issues. The list of problems for the buyer included a smouldering fire in unburied waste at the edges of the pit – edges within 1m of the boundary fence – and a pool of uncontrolled stormwater filling the pit. Taking the good with the bad, Wanless Waste Management decided to take its first step into the club of NSW landfill ownership, spending around $25 million to buy the site and undertake a fairly extensive list of activities to get it back up to scratch in the eyes of the EPA, Penrith City Council, and the neighbouring residents – who had been less than impressed with ongoing dust and smoke coming from the site. Wanless brought in a multidisciplinary civil engineering and environmental team from consultant SEMF to work through these issues and get the site ready for business again. In August, the site regained its EPA licence as a Class 2 solid inert waste landfill. According to Wanless’ project manager Adam Bloomer, the Kemps Creek site in Sydney’s west is now “pretty much a fully operational facility”, although there “are still a few small ongoing issues”, which should be sorted by the end of year. From now on, the facility will be taking upwards of 100,000 tonne of material annually, mostly from the company’s own collection operations. It’s an impressive transformation from disaster to potential cash cow, and one that will become increasingly tempting for other operators to emulate. given the difficulty of gaining approval for a new landfill site, old facilities with a bit of remaining space that were once considered too much of a headache to keep open, might now start looking pretty good. So what’s involved in bringing a terminal site back from the brink?
Permitted to please
An unsafe pit and a smouldering fire were among the problems Wanless purchased.
started on the 6-8 month Wanless project in 2007, step one was getting a handle on what the existing permit conditions were. Described as “fairly standard”, the conditions transferred directly to the new owner because it was not proposing changes to the existing approved use. McCambridge says it was then a matter of talking through the conditions with the EPA and council to get the permit reactivated, explaining “[this site] has got new owners now,
about 50m wide, meaning any worker would be too close to unsafe walls and, adding to the drama, “the bottom of the hole was full of water, and no one was really sure what was underneath”. Various options were discussed, including potentially using long-armed machinery to place waste, although in the end Wanless was (luckily) able to purchase some surrounding land, enabling it to batter back the slopes to a safe angle.
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It was like a series of dominoes – you had to fix one problem before you could deal with the next problem.” – John McCambridge, SEMF we understand there has been problems on the site in the past, but the new owners want to do the right thing, get this up and running and meet all your requirements”. First on the list was fixing a poorly designed pit, greedily excavated to within 1m of the site boundary and with 25m high side walls cut at such a dangerously steep angle that “you couldn’t send machinery in there safely to do anything”. The bottom of the pit was only
SEMF N O V Ehas M B about E R / 170 D E Cstaff E M Balong ER 2008 the eastern seaboard, and John
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The possibility of purchasing surrounding land was investigated before Wanless signed any deal on the main site, and this option turned out to be a critical factor in the project’s success. But there was no such ‘easy fix’ getting water out of the flooded pit, with carting it offsite for treatment deemed too expensive. “We had to redesign the leachate collection system on the site, with the aim being [to] eventually pump
material out of the hole into a properly designed leachate collection dam, which could be properly managed,” says McCambridge, adding this was complicated by the fact the site’s existing dam was already full of stormwater. “It was like a series of dominoes – you had to fix one problem before you could deal with the next problem,” he says, with a stormwater management system the first step “so we didn’t have an ongoing problem”. Working on a tight site, another problem was that the previous operator had not managed to offload the rock it had excavated, with a 300,000 tonne stockpile of blue shale left on site and in the way of potential infrastructure, such as the leachate pond, not to mention causing dust issues for neighbours, the closest of which were only about 50m away. Wanless eventually found outlets for the stockpile, mostly to brickworks, although in the short term McCambridge’s team had to come up with somewhere on site to store it. Mercifully, there was one aspect of the rehabilitation project that turned out not to be as big a problem as everyone was expecting: the fire smouldering within a 5m high stockpile of unburied waste.
We e k l y n e w s u p d a t e s a t w w w . i n s i d e w a s t e . c o m . a u
