InfraBuild Recycling: Promoting a sustainable alternative to landfill

InfraBuild Recycling and the City of Newcastle are doing their part to divert materials for re-use by the steel industry that would otherwise end up in landfill.

InfraBuild Recycling is helping the City of Newcastle in its recycling operations with the goal of reducing the amount of waste material going to landfill.

The City of Newcastle recently opened the $6 million Summerhill Waste Management Centre to receive and process household and commercial waste, with InfraBuild Recycling collaborating with the Centre to recover ferrous and non-ferrous metals for recycling. The Centre was opened in September 2019 after an 18-month construction period.

Mark Johnson, Business Development Manager – Waste Services at the City of Newcastle, says the new resource recovery centre enables the efficient sorting of waste to further the transition away from landfill.

In a sign of the success of the operation to date, the Centre is currently achieving a 21 per cent diversion of mixed waste coming in against the City of Newcastle’s business case target of 13 per cent.

“Customers are encouraged to bring in source-separated loads of metals, but if they bring in mixed loads, that can go onto the tipping floor where we can sort through and recover recyclable metals,” Johnson says.

Mixed loads are sorted through a combination of manual sorting and the use of a material handler and tele truck to load aggregated materials into bins. Johnson explains that staff at the facility add value by separating out the more valuable metals or removing unwanted material to reduce the contaminants in the scrap.

InfraBuild provides the bins into which recovered metals materials are collected and arranges a regular collection: weekly in the case of ferrous metals, fortnightly for aluminium materials, and monthly for precious metals.

Summerhill Waste Management Centre receives waste from residences and businesses in the Lower Hunter region.

The waste that InfraBuild Recycling recovers through the Centre is processed by InfraBuild Recycling’s Hexham facility, and contributes to the 1.4 million tonnes of ferrous and non-ferrous scrap metal InfraBuild Recycling collects from resource recovery and other industries around the country every year. The ferrous metals it collects are then supplied as a raw material for the production of new steel to InfraBuild Steel’s Australian manufacturing facilities and to international steel mills as part of a sustainable and efficient steel supply chain.

Click here for more on InfraBuild Recycling’s services.
Click here for more on the Summerhill Waste Management Centre.