Wingfield - Veolia ResourceCo Alternative Fuels Diversion from Landfill Project

Wingfield - Veolia ResourceCo Alternative Fuels Diversion from Landfill Project is an alternative waste treatment project located in the industrial suburb of Wingfield, approximately 10km north of the Adelaide CBD in South Australia. It was registered in January 2013 and covers an unrecorded project area, as it operates strictly within the footprint of a waste processing facility rather than a broad agricultural expanse. The regional land use is heavily urbanised and designated for industrial and waste management operations. The surrounding Adelaide environment experiences a Mediterranean, semi-arid climate with moderate to low rainfall, and the regional coastal plains are typically composed of clay and sandy loam soils.

Alternative waste treatment projects under the Carbon Farming Initiative involve diverting mixed solid waste away from landfills to prevent the release of methane gas that occurs during anaerobic decomposition. The standard requirements for this methodology involve carefully measuring the diverted waste and ensuring it undergoes an eligible treatment process. In this project, commercial, industrial, and demolition waste is diverted and processed at a specialised treatment facility to produce a combustible fuel substitute known as Process Engineered Fuel (PEF).

An interesting note about this project is that it transitioned from a revoked 2012 legacy waste methodology to the 2015 Alternative Waste Treatment determination in March 2015. The highly automated Veolia-ResourceCo Wingfield facility, the first and only one of its kind in Australia at the time, is capable of sorting up to 350,000 tonnes of raw waste per annum, recovering over 90% of the material. This yields approximately 100,000 to 150,000 tonnes of PEF each year, which is utilised as a replacement for fossil fuels like coal and gas in high-combustion settings such as Adelaide Brighton Cement's kilns. The project successfully delivered its fixed carbon abatement contract (CAC401610) with the Clean Energy Regulator, completing the contract in August 2022.