2017-08-08 Services & Organisation Committee Agenda

SERVICES & ORGANISATION COMMITTEE MEETING AGENDA                                   8 AUGUST 2017


3.    PEOPLE

An additional Admin Officer has worked in the Waste Section for the past few months to cover
long service leave and to assist in the implementation of the new contract and additional garden
waste bin services. Other staff numbers and positions remain constant.

4.    SYSTEMS & PROCESSES

Environmental

Landfill capping and methane extraction
In late 2016 the recently completed stage 2.1 of the landfill was subject to an intermediate
capping program. The $500,000 program implemented by Cleanaway extended to improving
other older capped sections that were porous and leaking methane. The program coincided with
upgrades and extensions to the gas collection pipelines – this work was done by LMS, Council’s
contractor responsible for methane extraction and flaring. The work was completed in late
January 2017 and the subsequent improvement in gas capture was immediate and is illustrated
in the below table.




Improvements in the management of landfill surface waters
The Receiving Environment Monitoring Program for the landfill requires surface waters to be
monitored during the first flow event of each season. Historically this has involved officers
physically checking the monitoring point after each rainfall event to determine if water was
flowing off site from the sedimentation basin. The Waste Section has recently installed flow
meters with remote telemetry and SMS alerts on the water quality monitoring point. This will
mean that water quality will be monitored continuously and real time alerts will be sent to officers.
This is expected to improve environmental performance and save officer hours in visual checks.

The sedimentation basin, which collects all stormwater from roads and processing pads is dosed
with flocculants to remove sediment out of the water being released to the receiving environment.
Historically the automated dosing system for this basin has dosed based on rainfall. This method
never took into account the fact that water soaks into the ground before flowing into the HES
basin and as such there was chronic overdosing of flocculent into the HES basin. This was
inefficient as it usually resulted in over use of flocculent and high aluminium load in the water. In
the past 6 months this dosing system has been replaced with a flow based dosing system,
meaning that only the necessary amount of flocculent will be dosed based on the amount of
water entering the basin.



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