Trash to power: Councils to send rubbish to Kwinana as leachate takes over Tamala Park

Five Perth councils have been given the green light to take their household trash to a waste-to-energy plant in Kwinana instead of the problematic Tamala Park Waste Facility.

The Mindarie Regional Council decided at a behind closed doors meeting on Thursday night to allow the Cities of Perth, Stirling, Vincent, and the towns of Cambridge and Victoria Park, to take their red-bin waste to ACCIONA’s Kwinana Energy Recovery.

The facility integrates the recovery and reuse of waste to generate electricity that can power more than 50,000 households.

MRC chairperson and Town of Cambridge mayor Gary Mack told 9 News Perth the council voted to allow five of its seven member local governments to send their waste to the alternative site.

“The councils must endorse that proposition themselves and what will happen is that the red bin curbside waste will be collected as usual, but instead of going up to Tamala Park for those five councils, it will be taken down to the gate at the Kwinana waste-to-energy plant to be incinerated to create electricity,” Mack said.

For the past five years the MRC, with member councils, have been working on where they will take their waste once the tip reaches “completion”.

The rough plan was to secure a contract with the Kwinana waste-to-energy site to ensure red bin household waste from each local government area would continue to be accepted and managed once landfill reached capacity.

But in June, the cities of Joondalup and Wanneroo said they were no longer willing to back the waste-to-energy proposal, so none of the member councils could benefit from the MRC’s plan.

The five member councils that initially supported the plan were granted exemptions to enter into a waste-to-energy contract or another alternative to the Tamala Park landfill.

This ensures the Kwinana Energy Recovery plant will accept the waste from the five local government areas which accounts for 481,000 Perth residents.

Mack said he expects the first of the smaller councils will make the move in the coming months in a phased transition.

The announcement comes after new City of Perth council agenda data this week revealed leachate levels in the landfill were significantly higher than expected.

The report revealed the MRC provided the Department of Water and Environment Regulation with a revised estimate of leachate stored within Stage 2 of the landfill.

That revised estimate found leachate levels had risen from “approximately 417,000 [cubic metres] to approximately 2.07 million m³, or about 2.07 billion litres, after incorporating measurements from internal landfill-gas wells”.