The goal was to find ‘beauty in the unusual’.

Congratulations to Adam for his work, and his amazing eye in capturing the scenery detail!

The following are a few images from the day:

I arrived in Copenhagen in time for day three of the COP15 talks at the end of last year.  My role at Copenhagen was to represent the interests of Australian local government as part of Australia’s official delegation.  The Premier of South Australia, Mike Rann, was there representing premiers and chief ministers and the Queensland climate change minister also attended.  Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong and the Prime Minister were the federal elected members in the delegation.  The rest of Australia’s 114 strong delegation were senior officials – mainly from the federal level but also a small number from state government. 

Copenhagen was a fascinating spectacle.  There was much happening each day around the Bella Centre (the venue for the talks) and it was great to see the views of local government from around the world being fed into the negotiating agenda of many countries.  There were about 20 people from Australian councils who were also in Copenhagen for the talks as part of the more than 30,000 strong army of observers.  I met regularly with many of them to ensure that the Australian local government message was a consistent one.  

ICLEI (the international network of local governments for sustainability) was pursuing the inclusion of a specific reference to local government in the ‘shared vision statement’ which was being negotiated by countries at the COP.  Although the shared vision draft was shelved as the COP struggled to achieve consensus at its conclusion, countries generally saw and accepted a key role for local government and other sub national governments to play in adapting to the impacts of climate change in the future.

If you followed the media coverage from Copenhagen at the time, you will have a very good idea of how the negotiations progressed – i.e. it was a fluid and different to control beast.  The elephant lurking in every room of the huge Bella Centre was the question over what emissions targets should be agreed to by nations, how this should differ between developed and developing countries and the level of financial support to be paid by rich countries to poor countries.  These were the headline matters which were never far away no matter what technical minutia was being thrashed out between negotiators in one of the many rooms.

As a member of the Australian delegation, I was able to participate in the daily Australian delegation briefing meeting each morning.  There were about 60 people involved in these discussions which took place each morning at 8.30am prior to the commencement of negotiating meetings.  The business of the delegation was very efficiently organised and the various Australian Government officials were allocated across the myriad of meetings which took place simultaneously each day.  The morning delegation meetings were a chance to report back on events from the previous day and also to highlight issues that may arise over the course of the coming day.  I was also given the opportunity to provide feedback at these meetings.

The Australian delegation was led by Louise Hand who is Australia’s Ambassador for Climate Change.  It was mainly comprised of officials from the various relevant Commonwealth departments (in particular – the Departments of Climate Change and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade).  Perhaps appropriately for a two week global discussion on climate change, a weather man from the Bureau of Meteorology was also present. 

It is hard to describe exactly what it was like being in Copenhagen.  The Bella Centre was a massive space and it had been extended for COP15 with huge temporary canvas structures.  The peak morning arrival of participants (almost all by train) was orderly and generally efficient – although this changed in the second week as security was stepped up with the arrival of world leaders.  The tight security and massive cloakroom was fast and the papers office similarly nimble in its ability to dispense thousands of documents in a short period.

There were various interest groups broadly recognised at COP15: business, farmers, indigenous people, local government, trade unions, young people and women.  Each day there are approximately 100 side events scheduled which were open to all participants.  Topics discussed at the side events traversed virtually all imaginable issues related to climate change and sustainability.  They tended to be of varying quality, but most were informative and featured expert presenters who had invested significant time in preparing their presentations.  There were also about 1000 trade exhibitors – mostly NGOs trumpeting their particular cause or countries boasting that they had been doing more than their fair share in combating climate change. 

The whole experience resembled something similar to a music festival – with 20,000 or so people milling around, talking, eating at one of the various food vendors (which were generally over-priced and of fairly dismal quality), debating ideas or simply going along to one of many events which were going on throughout each day.  Wireless internet was everywhere and there are almost as many laptops as there are people and mobile phones.  NGO representatives scampered left and right trying to get their hands on that latest draft of some meeting just concluded or to lobby someone or other.  Other participants would be checking their Facebook page or media websites from their home country to see how it all was being reported. 

On Thursday of the first week, I passed a group of enthusiastic young climate activists who had bailed up Lord Christopher Monckton, a prominent climate change sceptic, and engaged him in a rigorous debate over climate science.  Unknown to him, some plucky person had stuck a sticker on his back which proclaimed ‘I love climate change’. 

Not surprisingly, sceptics like Lord Monckton were in short supply at Copenhagen.  Participants were generally either passionate representatives of one of the thousands of NGOs, part of one of the various country negotiation teams or part of the army of journalists.

As a member of Australia’s delegation I got unrestricted access to all negotiating rooms and sessions.  Negotiations were divided between the twin track proceedings of the ‘Conference of the Parties’ under the United Nations Convention on Climate Change and the ‘Meeting of the Parties’ under the Kyoto Protocol.  When either track was not meeting in plenary, negotiations were separated into two respective ad hoc working groups and then these were broken down further into subsidiary bodies, contact groups and informal consultations.  Negotiations typically extended well past the 8.00pm slated finishing time, with some sessions often still going after 2.00am. 

Wandering in and out of these, one couldn’t but help admire the patient officials diligently debating the issues in dispute. 

When meeting in plenary, a massive room was set up with the 193 lead country negotiators seated behind hundreds of tables.  These sessions were chaired from the front table on the stage and delegates patiently waited for the call to make their contribution.  Contributions were typically spoken slowly and with extreme deference to the chair.  Brevity, thankfully, was almost always practiced. 

Conveniently, countries organised themselves into blocs of like interests.  Australia was part of the ‘Umbrella Group’ which it chaired and this group comprised non-EU developed countries such as the United States, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, and Russia.  Through this leadership role, Australia was contributing well above its relative international size.  Along with Denmark (which was similarly elevated by virtue of its role as host), the European Union, the United States, Brazil and China, Australia was one of the key players over the two weeks. 

The outcome reached at Copenhagen has been widely reported in the world’s media and people will have drawn their own conclusions on what was, or was not, achieved.  I am not as pessimistic about the outcome as many media commentators have been.  I think getting world leaders to agree to limit global warming over coming years to two degrees and to a $100 billion per annum transfer to developing countries is significant.  Obviously, there is still a long way to go in putting the necessary commitments in place to achieve such goals, but progress was definitely achieved and I am hopeful this momentum will continue into this year – in particular at COP16 in Mexico at the end of the year. 

In terms of local government, what is clear is that we are a critical player in any approach by countries to tackle climate change.  Many of the adaptation and mitigation strategies discussed at Copenhagen had relevance to local and state level governments and in this sense local government’s role was regularly touched upon.  Obviously, the focus of the negotiations was at the international level between countries so specific aspects of the role of sub-national governments was more of an issue in framing each individual country’s particular position rather than part of the general plenary discussions.  However, any emissions target which is adopted by a country will need the active championing, support and intellectual property of its local government if they are to have any chance of succeeding.

From 1 July 2009 the NSW Labour Government introduced the waste and environment levy to include local government areas in NSW along the coast north of Port Stephens to the Queensland border and west of Sydney to the Blue Mountains and south of Wollondilly.

This extended area became known as the “Regional Regulated Area” and the authority to attach the levy to these facilities was derived from application of “section 88 of the POEO Act 1997 (POEO Act)”. This meant that occupiers of certain scheduled waste facilities are required to pay the waste environment levy, similar to the charged to waste facilities in the metropolitan areas of Sydney, Wollongong and Newcastle.

The introduction of the waste and environment levy was meant to provide an incentive to waste facilities to recycle, reuse and reprocess materials for reuse in the marketplace. A deduction from payment of the S88 levy can only be claimed when waste is either:

• Transported from a waste facility to another place for the lawful reuse, or
• To another facility for lawful recycling, processing, recovery or disposal, or
• Where waste is used for an approved purpose

The current rate for Regional Regulated Areas is $10.00 per tonne with a rise of $10.00 + CPI in July for each of the next 6 years.

The levy is meant to be an economic driver of the resource recovery and the recycling and processing of waste in order to divert and minimise waste to landfill. The State Governments objective as enunciated in legislation  is for the diversion off 66% of waste currently disposed of to landfill by 2012

The levy is applied to all waste entering the landfill excluding waste approved for operational purposes. As each year passes the cost to councils of disposing of waste to landfill will increase along with the fees Council will be required to charge in order to recover costs. It is thought that this will drive programs that will reduce waste to landfill or provide an incentive to develop alternate processing and disposal methods.

In addition to the costs of disposal, the cost of licence compliance has also increased substantially. Materials entering the landfill for the intermediate capping, cell maintenance and road works, are now subject to the levy. This has immediate financial implications for the daily operations of the landfill due to licence conditions or licence compliance issues such as daily cover.

Prior to July 2009 sites were able to source shale/clay for $7 – 15 per tonne, but by placing the current $10.00 levy on top of this the cost of materials required for maintenance works and licence compliance has nearly doubled, as only approved final capping and cell construction materials attract the “approved operational purpose” levy exemption.

Within 5 years with the levy at $50.00 (+CPI) per tonne, landfills will only remain sustainable by establishing cost efficient recycling and reprocessing techniques and reuse recovery of materials for onsite purposes with daily cover, cell and road maintenance attracting the levy.

The DECCW initially indicated that 50% of the levy would be returned to Council for approved purposes which would generally involve sustainability and waste reduction, with the approved purpose not being specified or tied by the regulators. However, as the levy approached this was reduced to 50% of the levy pertaining to municipal kerbside collections, and the money could be used for purposes determined by the regulators. If a Council did not have approved programs as per the regulators’ deemed purposes, they risk not receiving the levy return. Additional, the amount was reduced to a percentage of the pool of funds dedicated for the payment by the State Government to be determined on a pro rata basis.

A little outside of the normal scope of A Good Sense of Waste articles, but I thought that you would appreciate the skill involved in working with such an unweildy material that’s normally seen as a pain to deal with! One man’s trash is another man’s…art?

Hyder have completed a landmark LCA on the Wollert Landfill in northern Melbourne compared with AWT that concludes “While there is no clear “winner” amongst the scenarios and technologies assessed, all of them – including the current base case involving disposal at Wollert landfill – resulted in net savings of greenhouse gases.”

A far cry from the “we must divert organics from landfill at all costs” brigade!  Looking at the detail of the study the key variables were the efficiency of the methane capture at Wollert, the storage of carbon at Wollert and the net export of electricity from an anaerobic digestor.

Wollert has been conducting a series of emissions measurements over the last 2 years using flux box technology developed by Dr Stuart Dever at GHD.  The results were remarkable in that they found emissions of methane were much less than anticipated, especially from the current cell with no collection infrastructure.  The measurements showed that fresh waste takes considerably longer to start emitting methane than has been assumed and even then the emissions are low.  This is thought to be due to composting of waste in the early days and methane oxidation in the later stages.  The result is that methane collection efficiency on a whole of site basis is between 68 and 88 % using conservative upper and lower bounds.

Carbon storage in landfill is now an established scientific fact.  Long term accelerated degradation studies have found significant proportions of the organic fractions of the waste do not decompose in simulated landfills.  This is related to lignin in the waste that is known not to degrade in anaerobic environments.  The non-degraded organics effectively store carbon from the atmosphere permanently.  This is encapsulated in the IPCC models as the DOCf factor.

Anaerobic waste technology providers claim they have an net export of electricity, but this is yet to be demonstrated in Australia.  The LCA used a range of zero to 68 kWh/t based on manufacturers data.  Wollert landfill have demonstrated very reliable net export of over 100kWh/t and can achieve 160 kWh/t over the long term.

This study has ramifications for policy makers and alternative technology providers in that it is no longer tenable to claim that just diverting organics from landfill will save tonnes of CO2eq in greenhouse emissions.  Even in the worse conceivable case Wollert reduced greenhouse emissions rather than increased them.  With the perspective of energy recovery in mind, landfill far out performs any alternative except incineration and all with almost no greenhouse emissions.

Rob McGahey, Senior Waste Industry Specialist

Caterpillar Asia-Pacific

With the majority of the landfills getting close to capacity in Melbourne and Sydney, some landfill operators are still struggling to understand what influences the compaction of waste and how that can impact on their future business and earnings. Where will new landfills be? If they are out of the regional areas will there be additional costs involved in the collection and transportation of wastes to their final destination? By reviewing your compaction rates, opportunities exist to extend the life of your existing landfill while assessing alternative options.

Compaction is not relative to the operating weight of the machine alone – there are a number of factors that can affect it. These include ground pressure of the compactor, waste type, layer thickness (not daily lift thickness), amount of passes, working up hill or down hill and the ability to track where your compactor has been working on the face to ensure you are getting a good coverage of each layer.

Ground pressure is the one most landfill operators have difficulty in understanding. The easiest way to explain it would be to look at two dozers with the same operating weight and one with a Low Ground Pressure (LGP) track and the other with a standard track. You could drive your LGP dozer over a piece of soft ground and leave little or no imprint as it has spread its weight over a larger area, but drive the standard track dozer (same operating weight) over the same ground and you will see it sink into the tracks left by the LGP. This is the same with compaction – more ground pressure means more compaction (for the same layer thickness).

If you are able to increase your compaction rate by just 5% from what you are doing today, what would that offer you? For example, on a landfill that had a projected life of 10 years, if you were able to increase your compaction density by 5% you would be able to receive another 6 months of waste. What is this worth as revenue through the gate alone?

Fuel consumption is another factor that is important when looking at landfill compactors. You need a performance or production-based fuel consumption rate – hours per litre are of no use as you don’t know if the machine was idling or working or how hard it was working for the numbers you see. Fuel consumption should be measured by either litres used per tonne of waste handled (l/t) or litres used per tonne per cubic meter compacted (l/tm3), the same as you would do with a mining truck l/t (weight), or a dozer l/m3 of rock moved (volume).

So understand what your needs are then ask the questions to make an informed decision about your situation.

Olivia Robertson, Mandalay Technologies

Many councils in Australia are faced with the challenge of deciding what type of gas management system to install as EPA/DERM licensing requirements for maximum waste tonnages to landfill are reached.

What can councils do when placed in this position?

• Perform more investigations to ensure gas generation estimates are correct
• Install more gas wells and monitor them
• Confirm requirements with EPA/DERM
• Install a flaring system
• Continue to investigate gas extraction systems and power generation
• Perform CPRS calculations with a cost-benefit analysis completed for an active and non-active gas extraction system

Councils are placed in a position where they have to engage consultancy companies to carry out future landfill gas generation assessments to ascertain present and future landfill gas generation. These companies use a range of overseas kinetic models which provides an estimate of the possible production that can be expected under certain conditions (and can only be used a predictive model).

What options do councils have if they have to install a gas extraction system?  There are four:

• Design and Construct – contractor to design, construct and commission, council engages a specialist contractor to operate
• Design Build Operate (DBO) – Council engages a contractor to design, build and operate. Contractor to be paid based on $/MWh of electrical output. Council to receive all monies from sales, renewable energy credits and carbon credits.
• Joint Venture/Partnership – share all costs and revenue
• Build Own Operate (BOO) or Build Own Operate Transfer (BOOT) – council engages a contractor to design, construct and commission and operate and Council to receive a royalty.

Queensland faces a more limited range of options, given the lack of waste levy and associated lack of revenue from this source. DBO is the most feasible of the above options for Qld.

It appears Victorian Councils are leading the way in the uptake of this technology, engaging LMS and EDL to design, construct and operate the gas extraction systems on council-owned landfill sites. The council may then be paid a royalty on % of revenue earned by the contractor (gas extraction company) generally in excess of a base amount. Councils such as Wyndham, Geelong, Whittlesea, Hume and City of Melbourne have all been involved with such projects which have been extremely conducive to revenue raising.

In response to Sam Bateman’s article ‘Energy Recovery from Waste’, no-one including me has an issue with landfills capturing gas and using it to generate electricity. It is a brilliant use of a waste product. The more we do of it the better. The higher the national gas capture rate the better. The more energy we can extract from landfills the better.

Sam wants more organics to go to landfill, generating more gas which can be turned to electricity. Sounds sensible?

Where the argument falls down is that landfills cannot capture all of the gas. Fugitive emissions leak out from the landfill as methane. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas with a climate forcing effect of 21 times carbon dioxide.

So the more organics we put into landfill, the more fugitive emissions there are and the more we contribute to climate change.

If landfill gas capture rates could be substantially improved I would be agreeing with Sam (for organic waste anyway).

But there are real structural, engineering and cost implications of trying to capture all of the methane from a landfill.

The IPCC estimates that gas capture could be as low as 20%.

Work by Hyder Consulting showed that the balancing point was 90% gas capture. That is the capture rate you would need to achieve where the carbon savings from generating electricity from methane equalled the climate change effects of the fugitive emissions. Only a couple of landfills in Australia could claim above 90% gas capture rates.

The idea of putting NEW organics into landfill just does not stack up. Even if you take a conservative middle position of a national 60% average gas capture, the environmental costs of the fugitive methane emissions greatly outway the environmental benefits of the green electricity created.

The best thing to do with the organics is compost them, or anaerobically digest them in an fully enclosed system which captures 100% of the gas.

Which brings us back to the key point. We need to massively increase methane capture rates at landfills in Australia. One point often missed in the debate is that capturing gas is an expensive exercise. Capturing all of the gas is cost prohibitive.

Landfill gas capture can be managed for an ECONOMIC return or MAXIMUM gas capture, but you can’t do both at the same time.

What do I mean by this?

All Australian landfill gas systems are currently managed for ECONOMIC returns. That is, the effort applied to gas capture is balanced against the economic return of doing so. Gas capture is OPTIMISED. It is not maximised.

Optimal gas capture means the most cost effective piping systems are used, capping is done at an operationally sensible time, motors are only installed when they deliver an economic return via electricity sales, capping to enclose methane is done at an optimal time etc. The goal is to maximise economic return of the gas system NOT to maximise gas capture.

A Maximum Gas Capture system goes all out to capture all of the gas irrespective of the cost of doing so. Pipes are installed during construction, flaring commences immediately methane is produced, caps are installed as soon as possible, motors are installed as soon as possible, small motors are used to ensure they go in early, the step function between flaring and motors and between motors is small, capital costs are focussed on complete gas capture etc. It costs a lot to do this.

In the current Australian energy and regulatory market it would not be sensible to pursue a Maximum gas capture regime. A landfill operator will not get much in the way of additional sales revenue from the additional gas captured and in the absence of an Emissions Trading Scheme gets no reward for having avoided polluting (by capturing all of the possible fugitive emissions).

So where does that leave an economically rational landfill operator? It leaves them capturing optimal levels of gas and allowing the hard to capture gas and fugitive gases to continue to leak from the landfill. It is the only course for them.

So until there is a real price incentive for landfill operators to capture all the gas, they will opt for an optimal solution and continue to contribute to climate change via their landfill emissions.

So Sam is right that landfills are good converters of waste to energy. But most are also good polluters and until the economics change they will continue to be so.

On the positive side Penny Wong has announced (in her recent negotiating position with the Opposition) that emissions reductions from closed landfills and legacy waste will now give rise to a Carbon Permit. The permit will be fungible (saleable) into the CPRS. This is a huge step forward.

It answers they key conundrum above. It will provide a price incentive for landfill operators to chase more gas capture and reduce their emissions.

If and when all landfills in Australia are capturing above 90% of their methane emissions and can demonstrate it, Sam and I will be in total agreement.

I look forward to that day and will work with him to see it achieved.

Sam Bateman, Hanson Landfill Services

The new leader of the Liberal Party has come out with the mantra that the Rudd Government’s ETS is just a “massive new tax”.  This is a classic political fear campaign.  Everyone that thinks about the threats posed by climate change agrees that to have any chance of solving the problem there must be a cost put on CO2 emissions – in other words, a cost on carbon.  The cost of carbon is an external cost that the user of that carbon currently does not experience, but the rest of us experience it collectively.  To redress this failure a cost must be imposed on carbon, otherwise society will continue with business as usual until climate change creates so much dislocation that the cost of the results of climate change forces us to change.  The ETS is a way of putting a cost on carbon now before that happens, with the least chance of political interference down the track.  All the government has to do is set a trajectory for emission permits (which in effect will be set by international agreement) and then issue permits for auction each year that meet that trajectory.  The money raised can be spent in a number of ways: compensating affected people, building mitigation schemes, providing assistance to other countries, etc.

However, like all government tax funds, it will be spent eventually in the community and can provide impetus for change.  A cost on carbon will impact us all and lead to a change in our behaviour.  When petrol prices go up, people buy cars that use less fuel or drive less; and so emissions from transport goes down.  We all know that.

Attached is a diagram that explains the process City of Stirling uses to sort recycling from waste using a one bin system.

City of Stirling one bin policy – download.