Veolia Environmental Services has applied to increase the waste input to its Woodlawn Bioreactor landfill near Goulburn from the current 500,000 tonnes to 1.2 million tonnes per annum. A Preliminary Environmental Assessment, lodged with the NSW Department of Planning, states the additional tonnage will “provide for the current and future disposal capacity for the greater Sydney region, as well as the local and regional areas surrounding Woodlawn”.

The application to expand the volumes sent to Woodlawn was made in 2007, although the Preliminary Environmental Assessment was only finalised and submitted last month.

The Woodlawn facility was originally assessed for taking up to 500,000 tonnes of putrescible waste per annum by rail from Sydney. However, the Conditions of Development Consent (set in 2000) limited the input to 400,000tpa, which reduces by 10% every five years. The limit was based on an independent assessment of landfill demand and capacity at the time.

A more recent report on demand and capacity was prepared by Wright Corportate Strategy in 2008. The Department of Planning is yet to release this critical report, although some details were aired via the Director General’s Assessment of Dial A Dump Industries’ proposal to construct a new landfill for inert waste at Sydney’s Eastern Creek (see here).

“We are frustrated that [the Wright report] hasn’t been released, and looking forward to it being released soon – it’s a very important piece of information for the whole waste industry and we need to know what it says,” Veolia’s Shaun Rainford said.

The new assessment from Veolia points out that, when you compare actual waste generation and disposal rates over the last five years with some of the key predictions made back when the Woodlawn conditions were set, “it is clear the waste targets anticipated… were seriously optimistic”.

One reason for this, suggest Veolia, is that evidence for AWTs achieving the 80% diversion rate used in earlier modeling is “not convincing”.

If the Global Renewable’s UR-3R AWT at Eastern Creek instead achieves 60% diversion, and if waste disposal demand grows at more than 3.3% p.a, Veolia contends that WSN Environmental Solution’s Eastern Creek landfill – one of Sydney’s key waste facilities - could be full much earlier than the 2014 date suggested in previous government assessments.

Veolia proposes to increase the Sydney waste transported to Woodlawn by 400,000tpa. It also wants to take 100,000tpa of residual materials from the AWT it has proposed building at the Woodlawn site (which has been approved, but not yet constructed), plus another 200,000tpa of local regional waste from surrounding areas including Goulburn and the ACT.

The higher volume of waste would see the massive void at the old Woodlawn void filled and remediated more quickly than originally envisaged. When the site first opened, Veolia said it could have an operation life of about 70 years, with 33 million tonnes of waste expected to fit in the site. The proposed increase to the filling rate would reduce the site’s operational life to more like 25-30 years.

Veolia estimates the expansion would require a capital investment of $2.4 million, including for the purchase of new machinery such as dozers, and would provide an additional 11 full-time operational jobs.

As well as expanding the volume of waste taken at the site, it hopes to extend working hours at the facility to cope with the higher volumes.

Rainford is hoping to have an outcome on the application by the end of this year.

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