Eight Perth councils will end altogether the practice of sending up to 250,000 tonnes of waste to landfill every year after signing off on building a $400 million Australian-first waste to energy plant.
South Perth, Canning, Mandurah, Kwinana, Armadale, Gosnells, Serpentine Jarrahdale and Murray councils on Wednesday awarded a $400 million contract to build the country's first waste incineration plant in the industrial area of Kwinana.
They have agreed to send 100 per cent of their green bin waste to the plant.
Rivers Regional Council, representing the bulk of that group, has spearheaded the decade of research and development that led to the awarding of the tender to Australian company Phoenix Energy on Wednesday.
After 30 years of local government involvement – 10 of which have included working on this – RRC chairman Ron Hoffman will retire on Friday knowing he has crossed the finish line of his legacy project.
The RRC has not been alone in seeking a new solution, with other Perth regional councils all flocking to beg, borrow or build new regional waste disposal plants as landfills fill to bursting along the Swan Coastal Plain.
The matter has become urgent, with Cardup landfill near Oakford, for example, only a year or two from capacity.
"Landfill is totally environmentally unsustainable," Mr Hoffman said.
"You produce methane gas, you contaminate the land and it becomes unusable for half a century or more. It's also now government policy not to have any new landfills established in the metropolitan area."
The WA Environmental Protection Authority, after deeming waste to energy technology acceptable, has in recent years approved two other W2E plants, as they are called – one in East Rockingham and another in Port Hedland – but both will use low temperature gasification technology.
The Kwinana plant will be first to use incineration, or more particularly, Martin Grate technology.
Though used by hundreds of facilities worldwide, this has proved controversial in WA, with environmental groups and the WA Greens lobbying against approval for the Kwinana plant.
They objected on the grounds it defied the traditional "recycling hierarchy", being able to burn waste, recyclables and compostables alike without the need for the "reduce, reuse, recycle" doctrine. But Mr Hoffman said householders would continue to separate their recyclables as normal and the green bin waste would be the only waste fed to the plant.
Mr Hoffman said the technology had been used for more than 40 years overseas and was a more environmentally friendly way to generate electricity than coal.
He said it would divert 100 per cent of municipal solid waste from landfill and in doing so generate enough electricity to power around 35,000 homes. Phoenix could choose to sell this back to the grid or to industry.
"This has been an uphill battle," said Mr Hoffman, who as well as being the chairman of the RRC serves on a Joint Development Assessment Panel and as a City of Gosnells councillor and has served on numerous other local government panels in his career.
"This has been challenging but satisfying and it's an excellent outcome for ratepayers and residents and represents such good value.
"There is no financial outlay, no cost, no risk to local governments. This contract is the first of its type in Australia. It is all done by private industry and equity holders. All the councils have to do is guarantee delivery of the waste."
The state government wants West Australians to have ended their dependence on landfill as early as 2020.
