Infrastructure

By Ron Wainberg – Technical Director, MRA Consulting Group Energy from Waste (EfW) is very well established overseas, but in Australia it has yet to get off the ground. The reasons for this are to be found in a complex combination of different historical factors: adequate landfill capacity, poor financial incentives, unfavourable public perceptions and lack […]

Landfill gate fees typically cover costs of operation, overheads, mobile plant and equipment, labour, depreciation costs of roads and buildings and other fixed assets and profit. But the costs (and therefore the gate fee), also need to include 30-50 year post closure management, long term monitoring and reporting, and importantly replacement of the landfill asset […]

There has been much said recently about the need to use nuclear energy as a bridging technology while renewable technologies and battery systems in particular, are improved. It seems to me that waste and recycling have again been overlooked as serious contributors to Australia’s emission abatement task. In 2006 Warnken ISE and SITA Australia published […]

Community engagement and the waste hierarchy were the running themes of the 2014 Energy from Waste Symposium held in Lorne, Victoria last week. According to NSW EPA director waste and resource recovery strategy Steve Beaman, those who attended the Waste Management Association of Australia (WMAA) event were already energy-from-waste “evangelists” who agreed with the direction […]

I have serious doubts about the claims the NSW Government is losing $100 million in landfill levy money at present and that this could grow to $200 million quickly. The solution is the reintroduction of a Queensland levy. At a NSW landfill levy of $95.20/t for the NSW Government to be losing $100 million – […]

Having read Mike Ritchie’s blog ‘Carbon Price: how not to overcharge or be overcharged‘ – I write to put the record straight regarding the likely price impacts from the Clean Energy Bill. Yes, there are three variables that influence the direct carbon price increase at landfills: 1) The waste emission liability 2) The price of carbon […]

By Angela Dorizas – The waste management industry has called for government intervention and investment in alternative waste technologies to prevent carbon pricing from crippling local communities. Speaking at the New South Wales Sustainable Development Conference in Sydney, state president of the Waste Management Association of Australia, Mike Ritchie, warned that without government intervention the increasing volume of […]

By Katrina Vella – Liverpool is to have a cleaner future with the opening of the SITA waste treatment plant in Kemps Creek. Liverpool residents generate 70,000 tonnes of waste a year with just 16 per cent being recycled. The plant will be able to recycle 82 percent of this. The $50 million facility, which will be fully operational in July, […]

By Mike Ritchie – Reusable material being dumped into landfill is the real problem. Australians use more than four billion plastic bags a year and most of these end up in landfill. But they represent only 20,000 tonnes of waste or 0.1% of Australia’s landfill waste. Read more

By Christine Ahern – Mike Ritchie from SITA Environmental Solutions says $4 billion of investment in national waste management infrastructure will be needed in order to meet state government waste reduction and recycling targets. He also called for governments to prioritise the phasing out of degradable organic carbon to landfill. Read more

By Mike Ritchie – Reusable material being dumped into landfill is the real problem. If you’re left holding a handful of plastic bags after you do a big supermarket shop and you don’t feel guilty, then you might be as impervious as the plastic bag itself is to breaking down in the environment. Read more