Providing weekly waste removal services to over 43,000 commercial and industrial clients and more than 3 million residents across Australia, SITA Environmental Solutions (SITA) has taken recycling to the next level.
In March 2009 the company officially opened its SAWT Advanced Resource Recovery Facility, which is said to be the future of sustainable organics management and resource recovery in Australia.
With an investment of $50 mil lion and a development timeline spanning six years, the new plant uses technology to process the organics streams from residen tial and commercial customers into compost. It also recovers reusable resources such as aluminium and steel.
Award judges say although the project is not manufacturing in the classical sense, it is definitely a sign of the future and worthy of the 2010 Technology Application award.
“This company is attempting to combat climate change by diverting organic materials sent to landfill from generating methane,” judges said.
SITA NSW post collection man ager, Andrew Kosciuszko, was on hand to accept the award which he said would enhance the reputation of the company’s work both in the Sydney and national market.
“The SITA sort facility continues to set the benchmark in com posting technologies in Australia and it’s pleasing to see the Endeavour Awards recognising this,” Kosciuszko told Manufacturers’ Monthly.
Kosciuszko says the company’s driving force is to provide better processes to Sydney’s waste stream, while avoiding waste to landfill and associated green house gas impact.
According to SITA, Australia generates over 40 million tonnes of waste each year, of which approximately 50% is being recycled. With Australian land fills generating in excess of 15 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions annually, councils and companies are actively seeking proven alternative processes that can divert waste, recover resources and help limit the cre ation of greenhouse gases.
Using a blend of robust inter national and Australian tech nologies, SITA is able to produce composts from mixed source feedstocks that are as clean as many source-separated composts currently on the market.
The company provides its kerb side service to both Liverpool and Penrith City Councils. The introduction of the source sepa rated organics offering in Penrith will enable approximate ly 60% of residential household waste to be recycled into a high grade product, reducing the City’s greenhouse gas emissions by 18,000 CO2 equivalent tonnes per annum.
The recycling rates of Liverpool City Council is also said to increase from 16% to more than 80% thanks to the plant.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Sanitarium Health Food Company – home to Australia’s iconic breakfast cereal Weet-Bix – has recently transformed its historic premises into a modern, fully automated packaging and distribution centre.
The decision came about after the company realised the repeti tive and laborious manual tasks comprising much of the packag ing process, had a deleterious impact on its staff, production potential, costs and ability to compete with local and interna tional manufacturers in the food and beverage market.
Sanitarium’s factory, situated in Cooranbong NSW, now fea tures new robotics, pallet wrapping systems and Automatic Guided Vehicle (AGV) technologies.
“The Robotic Automation P/L solution was right for Sanitarium as it provided a ‘whole of project’ approach taking responsibil ity from packet receival to ware house storage coupled with space effiency given the site’s limited available footprint,” according to Sanitarium Health Foods general manager, Darryn Woolley.
In order to save money and space in each robot packing/pal letising cell, the company decid ed to use the robot’s own con troller to control not only the robot itself, but also associated systems like conveyors, hot-glue sealing machines and case erect ing fixtures. This eliminated the need, cost and space for a sepa rate PLC control cabinet.
Further technologies responsi ble for the integration among these systems include: PLC pro gramming and controls; vision systems; conveyors; coded label ing; process tracking; and man agement system reporting.
The 100% Australian owned company says the packaging facility should require no more than two staff to oversee system operation and maintain the bulk supplies of packaging consum ables in the system. Change-over set-up time to handle other prod uct/sizes is said to require no more than 10 minutes.