From landfill to land improvement

Labelling something as ‘waste’ indicates it has no value. We want people to understand that everything that gets thrown out - except for hazardous materials - is a potential resource. Essentially, we want to ‘mine the urban ore’.

SITA has just unveiled its new-look brand, which was developed off the strength of its successful resource recovery operations around the country. The new brand has a dynamic, energetic and vibrant look, reflecting that the future of the industry lies in resource recovery rather than ‘waste management’. It also reflects the international experience of SITA through its parent companies.

The new brand will be used to stimulate discussion with businesses and communities about the resource potential of their waste streams. We want to illustrate that a focus on sustainable resource recovery means the future for the industry is very bright.

These days, most people understand recycling to be paper, cardboard, metals, different plastics and glass. Successful resource recovery goes much further. It involves taking raw waste streams and processing them to manufacture a range of quality products that meet the specific needs of our customers.

One of SITA’s streams of advanced resource recovery involves taking organic waste and processing it into products that customers can add to their gardens, lawns or orchards. Other products are used in agriculture to improve the soil for growing crops and pasture.

Every client has a different requirement and needs a specific product. The raw organic material is transformed into the product that suits the individual’s need.

SITA’s alternative fuels stream works in a similar way. Once the wet, organic waste is removed from the mixed waste stream for recovery, the remaining dry materials such as plastics, timbers, textiles - even shoes - can be recovered. These dry items have a high level of embedded energy (or combustible value) and through our processing technologies can be turned into alternative fuels.

This is a unique model in the alternative energy production space as we can develop green or renewable fuels that can be used in existing power stations or cement kilns. These renewable fuels would replace fossil fuels while still using the existing infrastructure.

The advanced technologies to recover and re-use mixed organic waste have been around for more than a decade in Australia. SITA has now developed its second generation of advanced resource recovery facilities at Kemps Creek in Western Sydney and Neerabup in Northern Perth.

SITA has a total of six composting advanced resource recovery facilities around the country - 50% of the facilities that exist in Australia today.

The alternative fuel advanced resource recovery facility in Adelaide - SITA-ResourceCo - has been operating successfully since 2007. This is our showpiece combustible fuel facility and highlights what can be achieved with the business model. We’re currently in discussions with state governments and potential product purchasers of alternative, green fuel to establish similar facilities in other states. We hope to have several more within the next five years.

To improve on the advances made to date and continue to divert an increasing amount of the waste currently going into landfill, we only need to implement small changes to our collection systems. Three-bin residential systems can have their food scraps added to the green bin. Recyclables would continue to go in the yellow bin, while the remaining bin would end up being mostly the dry combustible items used in alternative fuels resource recovery.

Businesses can also adopt greater source separation of their waste streams into dedicated bins. Of course, such collection systems only work with the required advanced resource recovery infrastructure in place.

In the medium term, there will be an ongoing need for landfill as we haven’t yet fully developed the markets for all the potential resources that can be recovered. Looking into the future, we will be able to recover more and more resources and the volumes going to landfill will decrease. How quickly this happens will depend on population growth, the uptake by businesses, and support from local, state and federal governments.

*Simon Gardner Lee is the General Manager, Marketing and Strategy at SITA Australia and has 20 years of experience in the natural resource management, resource recovery and waste logistics industries. He has lectured in Agricultural Production Systems at the University of Melbourne, constructed and operated Advanced Resource Recovery facilities and worked with global capacity building institutions such as the World Bank.