Industry challenges revealed at the recent WMRR conference

HydroTerra’s Richard Campbell and Annette Nolan attended the WMRR Australian landfill and transfer stations conference in Sydney this week.

Annette as Monitoring Services manager and based in Newcastle set a frenetic pace. Pre-Conference meetings organised with a range of consultants in Newcastle and Sydney. The meetings were a great success, thank you to all those we met with. We feel comfortable that our comprehensive and collaborative monitoring technology services with consultants is meeting a need in the market.

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The conference itself was a great success and revealed many challenges the industry is facing. Victorian operators seem to have considerable angst over the introduction of the GED. At the heart of it, concerns are raging over delays in regulatory approvals and the regulators perceived lack of faith in their appointed accredited auditors. These delays are costing industry money.

Further, angst interstate is being driven by PFAS criteria, playing havoc for the leachate treatment systems, trying to meet the performance criteria.

Some are wondering where it’s going to end. The elephant in the room, what’s next after PFAS? Landfills take in a lot of contaminants…….. All landfills generate leachate. Interestingly, at last there’s some discussions on banning these compounds at source.

Landfill gas, several interesting discussions on fugitive emissions monitoring. Drone based monitoring looking good and tracer tests looking good too. Traditional site walkovers with gridded approach, not looking good. New guidance is emerging in NSW.

Black Goo was chatted about! It’s clogging up leachate lines. It’s another compound, a moisture absorbent found in nappies.

The Big Presentation

I was lucky enough to be selected to present on a fascinating topic “From reactive to proactive: Turn compliance into an operational advantage with integrated monitoring systems.” It was a topic that took a while to coalesce into a clear message. It’s not always easy to communicate. 4am on the day of the presentation, I woke at last, with clarity. Time to redo the slides, looking good, review over breaky, weary but comfortable. Roll the clock to 3:50 pm. Time to shine. A good audience. Up to the lectern, wearing my reading glasses: oh no I can’t read the slides! Stumble, grumble, stumble not a good start. Gathered momentum as we moved to the pictures. The core message: we need to focus more on operational monitoring: leachate, head on liner, leachate sumps and pumps, free board on ponds and forecasting of leachate. It wasn’t pretty but I felt it was probably ok. The conference dinner: chatting with Daniel Fyfe “I always think it’s best to own our stuff ups”

The good thing about life is second chances!

Congratulations to WMRR for running an excellent event.