Veolia Excursion September 2017

This September Garden Club decided to take a field trip to somewhere close to home but a far cry from our traditional beautiful garden excursions. We met up at the Loaded Dog at 10am and boarded the little bus and headed up the winding road around the windmills to the Woodlawn Bio Reactor off the Collector Rd in Tarago.

The huge Bio Reactor facility opened in 2004, very basically, it is a landfill centred in the old Woodlawn Mine site which collects waste (mostly from Sydney & Canberra) which it then processes and turns into green electricity, it can apparently meet the energy needs of up to 30,000 homes!

Excerpt from the Woodlawn Bio Reactor Website:

The Woodlawn facility has prioritised sustainable and innovative waste management practices including:

• 7 landfill gas Bioreactors that recover up to 7 megawatts of clean energy from what would otherwise be gas-emitting waste material.
• Agriculture incorporating a working farm that applies nutrient and grazing rotation to help manage and understand impacts on the site.
• Aquaculture and horticulture capturing waste heat from energy production and using it for fish farming and hydroponic horticulture
• Mechanical and Biological Treatment (MBT) extracting organic content from the waste to produce compost for environmental rehabilitation.
• Windfarm (operated by Infigen Energy) that harnesses 48.3 megawatts of clean energy per year.
• Solarfarm utilising increased sun exposure from cleared land to produces 2.5 megawatts of clean energy per year.

Our first stop was the information centre where we were told all about the site, what they do and how they do it. We watched some videos about the bio waste management process and the obligatory induction video starring a few of our town's locals.

Next we headed over to the large Aquaponics area, where they use excess heat generated from the bioreactor to warm multiple vats filled with Barramundi, the fish are fed a high protein diet to encourage fast growth, the waste they produce is filtered out through large water troughs filled with little specially designed beads with large surface areas, these house bacteria that helps break down the waste. Plants are then also planted into these troughs using the waste water as nutrient for strong growth and completing the filtration cycle so that the water is returned into the vats containing the fish.

Back on board the Garden Club Express and we headed up the hill to the viewing area where we would able to gaze into the giant hole in the ground which now manages 20% of Sydneys waste! Trains freight shipping containers filled with waste from Sydney to Tarago each day where the containers are off loaded onto trucks and then carted up the hill to the old mine site, the waste is sorted for processing, the hole is ideally filled with bio waste which is then continuously being covered by dirt, the methane produced by this process is harvested and turned into energy and the waste heat from this process goes to the fish farm.

 Unfortunately the unseasonably freezing and windy weather made things a little less pleasant as we huddled at the viewing platform.

It is very important that rocks are not thrown or kicked past the barrier into the hole as it could be dangerous for the people working below.

We took some photos, some naughtier members tried to push the giant display boulder over the edge but luckily for the crew working below they aren't getting any younger and the several ton rock proved un movable.

We then thanked our hosts, boarded our little bus and headed down the hills and back to the Loaded Dog for a nice hot lunch by their open fires.