The City of Newcastle (CN) owns and operates the Summerhill Waste Management Centre (SWMC) at Wallsend, in Newcastle. The SWMC site had previously been worked as an open cut and underground mine until 1988 and was subsequently used for landfilling from 1995.
CN invested $23.8 million for the construction of the Cell 9 site at Summerhill Waste Management Centre. This new landfill Cell construction saw the equivalent of 280 Olympic swimming pools excavated in a bid to future proof the city’s waste disposal for the next decade. This new cell compliments the Resource Recovery Centre, which had already diverted more than 3,100 tonnes of recyclable product from landfill in its first 12 months of operation. This project is just one of a suite of waste-related initiatives undertaking to future proof Newcastle city and prepare for its growing population.
Plans for the site also include a state-of-the-art organics recycling facility, which will divert food waste from landfill and transform it into compost, redirecting 900,000 tonnes of food and garden organics from landfill over the next 25 years.
The Cell will hold a capacity of three million cubic metres of waste that isn’t able to be recycled and has been constructed with environmental concerns in mind. Cell 9 has been engineered with a high-tech protective synthetic liner to prevent any seepage into the ground. The material from the cell’s excavation has also been put to good use, with the city’s bushland regeneration team repurposing sandstone to restabilise bush and creeks in rehabilitation works as well as being reused in the cell and for the upgrading of an interior haul road.
Plans for the site will also see the extension of a landfill gas extraction system to capture the harmful greenhouse gas methane and turn it into electricity to feed into the national grid. This system currently powers 2,500 homes and saves around 8,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas every month.
