MRA’s planning team is glowing this Christmas with two development approvals granted in the last two weeks. Both approvals are for resource recovery facilities helping keep valuable materials out of landfill.
With landfill levies in NSW at $140.20/t you would think that sorting of commercial waste would be more common than it is. Less than 5% of the Commercial and Industrial (C&I) waste in NSW is put through a processing plant to recover the valuable materials. In other words, less than 120,000t of the 5.5 MT that is generated is put through a processing plant. There are no dedicated C&I sorting facilities in other States (and landfill levies are lower).
According to the 2016 National Waste Report, Commercial and Industrial waste (C&I) represents 20 MT of the 53 MT of waste generated in Australia (or 40% of generation). It also represents 34% of all waste sent to landfill (or 7.2MT out of 21MT) and achieves a 64% recovery rate compared to C&D (64%) and MSW (51%).
Not bad in the scheme of things.
The NSW EPA has opened the first round of its $2.5M Civil Construction Market Program (CCMP) under the NSW Government Waste Less Recycle More initiative (WLRM).
The new grants provide an opportunity for eligible entities to reduce the amount of C&D material being sent to landfill by reusing and recycling resources in other NSW civil construction projects.
By Mike Ritchie – Director, MRA Consulting Group On 16 February 2016, the Australian population reached 24 million people. Waste generation rates are a function of population growth, the level of urbanisation and per capita income[i] and Australians now produce about 50 million tonnes of waste each year, averaging over 2 tonnes per person. There…
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…
Important changes were recently introduced by the Protection of Environment Operations (Waste) Regulation 2014. These have considerably reduced the threshold levels for the holding of an Environmental Protection Licence (EPL) for certain waste activities e.g. processing, recovery and storage of waste. The new requirements mean that some existing waste businesses that were not previously required…
