South Australia's waste and resource recovery infrastructure plan
Published by Green Industries SA. Rawtec did the waste flow projection modelling and the infrastructure need analysis; EconSearch did the economic impact assessment. February 2018.
Summary published
South Australia already had the highest recycling rate in the country, at 81.5% diversion. The question this plan set out to answer was what physical infrastructure the state would need to keep going, and what it would cost.
Rawtec modelled the waste flows out to 30 years across three scenarios: business as usual, moderate additional diversion and high additional diversion. Then worked out what each scenario needs in bins, trucks, transfer stations and processing plants.
The ten-year answer is $166 million. The thirty-year answer is $990 million.
Diversion in 2015-16, highest in Australia
Infrastructure investment needed over ten years
Additional jobs at year ten
Municipal diversion, against 87% commercial and 88% C&D
What the modelling showed
The household bin is where the gap is
Municipal solid waste diverts 54% against 87% for commercial and industrial and 88% for construction and demolition. Municipal waste is only 17% of what metropolitan Adelaide generates but 40% of what goes to landfill. And food waste is the single largest component of the residual stream.
The ten-year picture
Under moderate additional diversion, by 2025-26 generation rises to 5,742,000 tonnes (up 938,000), recovery to 5,071,000 (up 1,158,000) and landfill falls to 671,000 (down 219,000). Target diversion rates: municipal 70%, commercial and industrial 89%, construction and demolition 94%.
The thirty-year picture
Under high additional diversion, by 2045-46 generation reaches 8,622,000 tonnes and recovery 8,528,000, leaving just 94,000 tonnes to landfill. That needs $990 million of investment and would add $660.5 million to gross state product and 4,969 jobs.
What the money actually buys
For the ten-year moderate scenario: 53,898 kerbside source separation bins, 10,121 skip bins, 60 collection vehicles, 4.5 transfer stations, 13.2 container deposit facilities, 40.8 drop-off facilities, 5.5 open windrow composting operations, 5.7 anaerobic digestion plants and 15.9 medium-technology reprocessing facilities.
Where it splits by stream
Ten-year investment: commercial and industrial $88 million, municipal $49 million, construction and demolition $29 million. Metropolitan Adelaide alone needs $94 million of it. Southern metropolitan Adelaide needs about 50,000 tonnes of extra materials recovery capacity, roughly $10 million of capital.
The levy question the plan leaves open
The study found it uncertain whether a $100 levy rate is high enough to make energy from waste competitive with landfill. It was clearer that sophisticated commercial and construction recovery already competes with landfill without help.
What the sector is worth now
About $1 billion in annual turnover, $500 million contributed to gross state product directly and indirectly, and around 4,800 jobs.
The gaps that are not concrete and steel
Integrated waste data systems, and radio-frequency identification on bins so contamination can actually be measured rather than estimated.
Workforce training and development. The plan treats this as infrastructure, which it is.
Market development for recycled products. Building capacity to make a material is pointless if nobody buys the output.
Long-term planning and zoning for special industry activities such as composting, thermal energy from waste, mechanical biological treatment and chemical waste disposal, plus buffer zones so the facilities do not get built out.
Photovoltaic panels, treated timber, batteries and absorbent hygiene products. Household chemical waste collection was flagged as an interim gap.
The figures come from a static model built on the best information at one point in time, and the plan says so. Capital costs exclude new landfill cells and the replacement or maintenance of existing infrastructure, and the infrastructure types considered are not exhaustive, so the plan describes its own numbers as conservative. It does not model remanufacturing or other downstream activity, and the source of the investment is deliberately left open. It is meant to be reviewed every five years.
Related reports
The measurement work these projections were built on.
The full plan covers metropolitan Adelaide and each of the eight government regions separately.
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