Coffs Harbour City Council is at the forefront of Local Government waste management strategies. The basis of its strategy is a partnership with private enterprise and the neighbouring Bellingen and Nambucca Shire Councils to provide a state of the art resource recovery system for the Coffs Coast community.
This partnership is now a model for regional waste management in Australia.
One site – the Coffs Coast Resource Recovery Park – houses this pioneering approach to waste management. A new Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) was commissioned in December 2005 to process recyclables collected from more than 40,000 households across the three Local Government areas. The MRF now processes more than 230 tonnes of material weekly.
The MRF also houses a dedicated Education Centre seating more than 100 people, and featuring a processing viewing window, closed circuit cameras showing close up views of sorting, and digital audio/visual technology that helps promote waste reduction, reuse and recycling to schools and community groups.
This year, the Coffs Coast Waste Services partnership has also seen the commissioning of the fully enclosed, air and moisture controlled Coffs Coast Resource Recovery Facility (CCRRF), which processes source separated organics and mixed waste. These new plants have been designed to recover more than 85 per cent of the domestic waste stream for beneficial reuse.
This facility’s Biomass organics processing section features ammonia scrubbers and air filtration systems to eliminate odour and environmental damage. The biomass plant will process around 60,000 tonnes or organics and mixed waste in its first year of operation, to produce high grade compost for domestic and agricultural operation, organic fibre for power generation and manufacturing, and a variety of recycled products.
The focus of the waste management strategy is that, ultimately, only 15 per cent of the waste produced on the Coffs Coast will end up as landfill.
