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Environmental Protection Act Licence Compliance Monitoring – Waste Recycling Facility
Issue
Enpoint’s client operates a waste recycling facility, which is a prescribed premise requiring operation under an Environmental Protection Act (EP Act) Licence. The site was also a former Class I landfill, which operated for approximately 20 years.
Enpoint has been engaged to conduct landfill gas and groundwater monitoring to comply with conditions imposed by the client’s EP Act Licence and to prepare the Annual Environmental Report (AER). The AER is submitted annually to the Department of Environment Regulation (DER), which documents the site’s compliance with all conditions stipulated under their EP Act Licence. Enpoint have been conducting this monitoring and reporting to the DER under their EP Act Licence since 2012.
The client has been operating at the Site since 2009 with the endpoint view of redeveloping the site for residential land use. All operations conducted at the Site have been conducted with this endpoint in mind, which has also included soil and asbestos sampling to characterise sand derived from the process, which is not a requirement of their Licence or the DER.
Enpoint Solution
Often, companies engaged to conduct compliance monitoring on behalf of a client who operates a prescribed premise will only do the minimum required to comply with any EP Act Licence conditions. As such, any monitoring / sampling work undertaken to satisfy Licence conditions reported to the DER Industry Regulation Branch under the EP Act does not comply with the stringent requirements of the DER Contaminated Sites Branch under the WA Contaminated Sites Act (CS Act), which is the legislation used to regulate contaminated sites in WA and their suitability for any intended use.
When conducting monitoring at the client’s site under their EP Act Licence, Enpoint collects all data and prepares all reports to not only meet the requirements of the EP Act Licence, but also in accordance with the requirements of the CS Act. This will allow the data to be used and relied upon during future investigation and remediation works in order to obtain an endpoint classification under the CS Act and subsequently allow the site to be redeveloped for the proposed residential land use.
Outcomes
The client is currently in the site closure planning stage with the aim of remediating and redeveloping the site within the next 3 years. During this process, the client plans to continue operating the waste recycling facility in parallel with the remediation to both part-fund and derive material for use in this process. The data that was collected as part of the EP Act Licence requirements will be relied upon when reporting to the DER under the CS Act to have the Site re-classified in order to allow the proposed residential development to proceed.
