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S2E5 - Eliminating Waste w/ Ingrid Cronin-Knight
26 Plays1 month ago
Today we're touring one of Waste Management's recovery centres in Auckland and meeting with Ingrid Cronin-Knight, Chief Growth and Sustainability Officer at Waste Management New Zealand. We talked to her about how to turn waste into gold.
We learned a lot from our visit. Recycling isn't easy but when done right we can recover a good portion of our infrastructure materials, especially concrete, steel, gib, and timber. We also learned that the simple act of higher waste levies encourages more recycling and more emphasis on designing out waste. We need more facilities like to take the load off landfills.
Your impact at work far outweighs your impact as an individual. Not much of what you throw out of your home gets recycled. Even if you're sorting your food waste, green waste, glass, and plastics, the vast majority of what you throw out goes straight to landfill. That's what makes specifying recycling on infrastructure projects so important. Since concrete, steel and asphalt are the easiest to recycle, our work can make a massive impact.
To learn more about Waste Management's construction waste recycling program, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZcK8CemEfU
To learn more about Waste Management's work with Aliaxis Group to recycle plastic pipes, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS4kV4kkwrM
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Transcript
Circularity in Waste Management
00:00:00
Speaker
Today, we're looking at circularity in action at the Waste Management Recovery Center in Auckland.
Intro to Sustainable Infrastructure Podcast
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome back to Infrastructure Connections, the podcast where we explore what makes sustainable infrastructure work.
Meet Ingrid Cronin-Knight
00:00:19
Speaker
Our guest today is Ingrid Cronin-Knight, Chief Growth and Sustainability Officer for Waste Management New Zealand.
Auckland Facilities Overview
00:00:28
Speaker
So we're sitting currently in our West Auckland facility. We have one in central Auckland and one on north Auckland. They have typically been transfer stations, so so all waste would come in into these sort of sites and then get consolidated and head to a landfill.
00:00:43
Speaker
What we've been doing is using these consolidation facilities now to take in loads of building and construction waste and then we'll put them onto a conveyor belt. We'll try and strip out the ah metals, the timbers, the jib boards, the plastics.
00:00:58
Speaker
The key to the whole operation is in this one room. Every eight minutes, a truck drops off a load of waste. It's then sorted by machine into piles, which are in turn loaded onto a conveyor belt.
00:01:09
Speaker
Pickers manually sort through the materials for timber, metal, jib, cardboard, and more, and drop them in giant bins.
Waste Processing and Recycling Rates
00:01:16
Speaker
What's left goes through a powerful magnet to pull off any remaining metals.
00:01:21
Speaker
But how much waste gets processed and recycled? Yeah, so we we pick up about a million tons of waste overall, and last year we recovered about 250,000 tons. That's not just building and construction or infrastructure activity, that's more across the whole board.
00:01:35
Speaker
in In building and construction we have a few facilities which we'll we'll talk about but they can recover between 50 to 75 percent depending on different projects and what theyve what they um put in the bin. But yeah, concrete crushing and and creating aggregates, metals is a large recycling one. We've got timber as being a waste. There's people that but we take it and we compost that will turn it into mulch.
00:01:59
Speaker
um There's ones that turn it into a chip but that goes into kilns to be burnt. So, you know, there's a range of different things.
Innovative Recycling Ventures
00:02:04
Speaker
Those are the big materials. And then you step down to plastics and and all class of plastics. So films, um which would be packaging waste, PET bottles, HDPE, you know, all those different types of plastics. There's different streams for those. Polystyrene we melt and ship overseas. So there's just a vast array of different materials, but they've got to be of a good quality to be accepted as an input product.
00:02:28
Speaker
We've just gone live really last year with a joint venture with LE Access Group. So they produce um PVC piping, like Mahali plumbing piping. And so with them, we take HDPE or PVC and downland crush it polyprop.
00:02:43
Speaker
um And we shred it in such a way, so we distill it, wash it, shred it, and it comes back as granules and then it will go back and come back as your
Economics and Challenges in Recycling
00:02:53
Speaker
Marley pipe. So you're basically creating both a commercial opportunity and an environmental opportunity.
00:02:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's ah it's wonderful to be part of an organisation where, like innate in the products and offerings that it does, it it it achieves those outcomes. Yeah, the first quote I ever heard was um that yeah the circular economy is mining the economy for the products rather than the environment, you know. The circular economy is an economy.
00:03:16
Speaker
The reason I wanted to talk to waste management is because now the waste they've been given has become an input, a product. Well, what's fascinating about this industry is that most in most industries, you either get they they give you money and they give you a product and service. In this industry, they give you a product and money. you know it's um but But what you what the what you you can do with it and what the chances to do with it different. but yeah you what defines something as being waste and then when does it become an input product and um that those that sort of labeling in that that those are blurred lines you know um but um i think to make money out of recycling or yeah at scale you need to be able to collect it sort it and sell it at scale um and uh what we find is that in order to sell it you've got to have a good quality on it and generally speaking a lot of material that comes in is highly contaminated
00:04:09
Speaker
ah And so it makes it a real challenge to people who actually don't want your waste. They actually want a quality input
Building Material Recycling Techniques
00:04:15
Speaker
product. And so that that's some natural tension that you do find in this industry. I had heard that some people recycle houses, binning each component separately.
00:04:23
Speaker
What does that even look like? There's an organization that does manual demolition where they go and strip it. Probably takes them five days to pull it apart and they can recover the timbers and the insulation and they treat the house with a lot of mana when they pull it apart and can get the highest kind of recovery rates from that process. How much of our construction waste can be recycled effectively?
00:04:43
Speaker
Yeah, so it vari it varies depending on mixed construction loads, how contaminated things are, but so we generally speaking see that most projects will on average be between 50 and 75%.
00:04:57
Speaker
We do have specific projects that we've been able to achieve over 90% with, which pretty amazing. which is pretty ah pretty amazing The challenge is that yeah the the demand for that kind of recovery is quite low still um and not every project does seek to get that kind of level high levels of recycling.
Non-Recyclable Materials and Solutions
00:05:15
Speaker
Not everything we use in infrastructure can be recycled and it's good to know what those are so we can work on replacing them with products that can or designing them out altogether. Yeah, there's some challenges with infrastructure like geocloth and, you know, there's some, yeah there are some challenges around it.
00:05:32
Speaker
Some of the plastics are heavily contaminated, so it can be a challenge. So particularly things like, um you know, sewage pipe we don't recycle. yeah um So there's health standards and things like that. But we we tend to find a lot more demand, though, from the commercial and residential sectors at the moment than rather than infrastructure.
Regional Recycling Practices
00:05:52
Speaker
So one of the... challenge challenges we have in New Zealand actually is treated timber. So we turn non-treated timber into everything from mulch and bark and different different products but treated timber itself at the moment the only outlet goes up to Golden Bay cement and goes into the kiln there to create more cement.
00:06:11
Speaker
So in Australia they have a lot more, they grow a lot more hardwood and so they don't have the same kind of problem. We grow a lot more softwood and then treat it. You're only avoiding it for one cycle and you the circular economy you really want to have it be able to go around many many cycles.
00:06:24
Speaker
So um the best way to make sure that things get recycled is to separate out the materials on site. Now um the building footprints are getting smaller and smaller so sometimes that's hard to do and we do have yeah the ability to put into one bin many of the different types.
00:06:40
Speaker
ah But it's not so it's something we do typically in the central Auckland facility but here we do it on demand when when customers really want that sort of Green Star, Home Star reporting. But yes we specifically have to have that Green Star or Home Star reporting.
00:06:53
Speaker
So if the client really wants to see um some environmental standards, then it tends to filter through. But they have real challenges on site, like the subcontractors that come onto the site. If they don't care or haven't been onboarded, they won't necessarily follow any of the yeah clear guidelines that that people have.
00:07:09
Speaker
Outside of Auckland Central, waste management doesn't voluntarily recycle materials unless it's a high-value good.
Structural Barriers and Waste Levies
00:07:15
Speaker
This is because of the high cost of sorting, and in some cases, there are structural impediments such as consents that require the facility floor to be clean every night, meaning all waste needs to be sorted and removed rather than left in a pile to accumulate value tomorrow.
00:07:31
Speaker
So what are those kinds of structural barriers? In Australia they've got quite a high waste levy. So to get context it's probably between $130 to $150 a tonne. So there are um large markets that are aiming to recycle every skip bin. So Bingo for example in Sydney have a huge facility where you put all these skip bins onto these conveyor belts and then it completely automates the process of streamlining the extraction of the hard-fill material, the metals, the timbers, etc.
00:08:03
Speaker
and they get high recovery rates. But here, our equivalent levy for that, those would be $10. So we just don't have the funding stream to get those kind of soils extracted.
00:08:16
Speaker
The next tier we've got is $35, but yeah there's a big difference between $100, $100 difference, which makes all the difference to how you can process it. Would that make a big difference in the market if we had higher levies here?
00:08:27
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. there's no doubt that if you have higher levies, you can fund more recycling and more automated recycling, and that will make a difference. The general rule of thumb is you probably need to have at least be $120 a tonne, and then that is when the recycling market starts to flourish. yeah i think I think my rule, the way I think about it is that tonnes will find their ways to the lowest cost disposal over time.
00:08:49
Speaker
you know and so um In New Zealand, having that differential of levy is actually prohibitive for the market. If it was just normalised and harmonised, that would make a big difference to more recycling. but At the moment in New Zealand, we have 41 class 1 landfills, between 38 and depending on yeah um some summer shutting. and and closing So we've got a lot of regional infrastructure for them and that's really important that you have that because if you have a large storm or a flood or a pandemic you need to dispose of your waste really safely.
00:09:19
Speaker
The next tier is of landfills, class two, which takes construction waste. We're starting to see them pop up more because they have a lower levee. in the waste. So a couple of years ago they probably did a couple of hundred thousand tonnes this year, just gone would be more around half a million tonnes. So there's definitely people diverting it to more big and see because there's a lower levy.
00:09:39
Speaker
um And then the soils, the managed fills, those ones which only have a $10 levy, we've seen quite a bit of ah things go out of the market and more recovery happening onto other building sites at the moment. So yeah.
00:09:51
Speaker
So we're we're currently trying to get consent for a resource recovery park in Wellington. Wellington is serviced by three landfills and they don't really have collection that's quite challenging.
00:10:02
Speaker
And so yes, we're actually in the process of trying to build a ah new facility once we get consent there, which will support building and construction recovery. In our previous episodes with Veena and Nicole, we've talked about the importance of keeping recycled material on shore to feed local production and manufacturing.
Material Flow and Traceability
00:10:20
Speaker
But how much of that happens and how easy is it to actually do? Yeah, well, I think um just to clarify, the biggest source of recovery, particularly from construction, would be hard fill.
00:10:32
Speaker
And that's not necessarily going to back to a remanufacture. It's going to fill in other projects or land or so you know soil um help on those.
00:10:44
Speaker
Metals, there's definitely, can be metal recovery in country. That's the other next biggest weight and timbers. Timbers, as I said before, it gets burnt. So if in Europe they consider burning a waste as being disposal still. So we we have that. we don't We have good good outlets for ah treated timber. So I think in the in the building construction industry, you'd probably say 70, 30. We're still shipping offshore things like The clear plastic wrap that comes around um products for packaging, carboards, polystyrene, those things get shipped offshore.
00:11:20
Speaker
ah But the plastics, you know, I just talked about Fletcher's have come online with a jib board manufacturing plant here, and that's got recycling and recovery as an input into it.
00:11:31
Speaker
And we've come online with PVC piping and HTP. So the more that we can get those facilities onshore, the more you can stop shipping it off. yeah So we call that chain of custody.
00:11:43
Speaker
There are some complexities which I'll talk about sure but shortly, but if you look at hard fill, 100% of that happens onshore. If you look at some of the plastics, you know so the the plastic film I talked about, 100% that goes offshore.
00:11:57
Speaker
ah Cardboard used to be 40% onshore, 60% offshore. yeah So there's ah there's different ratios. Polystyrene is 100% offshore. um Timbers 100% onshore. yes there this It does vary by material type.
00:12:11
Speaker
As you come to a consolidation facility and then it goes to another consolidation facility, it's hard to have line sight from that individual skip and load to where it ends up.
Improving Practices and Engagement
00:12:20
Speaker
But we are committed to improving that and in New Zealand on certain projects, if you request it, our team actually definitely show you the the destination where it's been disposed of, well not disposed of, where it's been recovered at.
00:12:35
Speaker
And that's but's it's more manual as opposed to automated at scale. But that's where we want to go, is having that that good transparency, not just onshore but also offshore. We can tell them broadly who we who we go to. So for example, we have a trading desk that sells cardboard to a range of different mills and they they are yeah Indonesia, India, China, theyre different places based on our stock price at the time. And so it's really hard to go that that bound of cardboard goes to that one mill at that time.
00:13:05
Speaker
um But we are transparent about where we take it and we also make sure that they're the kind of mills that have the kind of ethical standards that we would like to work with. ah But it is really hard to give that this bundle has gone to exactly where it's gone to. Do your teams ever visit those mills? Yeah, absolutely. We've set put people going over them all the time to make sure that they're of the standards. And then in certain ones, we want to make sure they're audited to the kind of quality, yeah particularly around the ethical labour standards.
00:13:34
Speaker
We want to make sure that those are compliant Even with the high percentage of recovery possible at these facilities, there remains a problem. The recycling is the end of the journey, so we need more emphasis on designing out virgin materials in the first place.
00:13:50
Speaker
Well, I was saying offline that um I, um you know, as a designer, i yeah you generally get given about 3% of the time to kind of figure these things out. These are really complex issues, and more more but in that process, you lock in all your long-range costs.
00:14:04
Speaker
So if you can design things to be to reduce the amount of material impact, you're taking it out of the whole system, and that would be an amazing thing. um So, yeah, so I think design is a pivotal part of this process. The other the other part that the government's helping with is...
00:14:20
Speaker
extended product stewardship schemes so or extended producer responsibility, but that's when they internalise the costs of the waste to the people that are actually producing or distributing the products. That's a a good lever because then they become responsible for those costs.
00:14:32
Speaker
I think that generally speaking, probably 70% of materials and products, if they were designed right, would be recoverable. and You're always going to have, like entropy is a natural part of life, so you're always going to have waste. Even somewhere like Germany, which has 80 million people, you know they're still disposing of 40 million people's worth of waste.
00:14:53
Speaker
So you're always going to have, and they lead the kind the the globe and in recycling, you're always going to have this residual waste stream, and it's important for health reasons that we take care of that. But I think there's the the chance for 70% of recovery, I think,
00:15:06
Speaker
that probably 30 to 40% is probably easily recoverable and that last next 30% needs some changes to the way we design our products, the material specs and and and that the price of those virgin materials.
00:15:19
Speaker
Governance is a major factor in the success of any sustainability program, so I wanted to know how waste management incorporates this philosophy into their daily roles. As a leadership we believe that for both the board and and at at the executive we believe it's the right thing to do.
00:15:35
Speaker
you when you Our strategy is called parahita, which means to be circular. And we measure our or top 50 leaders in the company by balanced scorecard on on those measures, but they cover off increasing circular recovery, being carbon neutral by 2050, making sure that you protect the environment in terms of any concerns, health and safety, yeah that we will have to our wellbeing of our people. All those things are in their balanced scorecard.
00:16:04
Speaker
um But so it makes sense. We've set the strategy, and we measure our people on it and we're making good progress. I think last year, you know the year prior we only recovered about 200,000 tons and then last year up to 250,000. So we're making really, really solid progress.
00:16:19
Speaker
So right now, dear listener of Infrastructure Connections, you're probably wondering what can you do right now to encourage recovery of infrastructure materials? So I think the one thing, well, there's probably two things actually. The first one is sort on site. you know The more you sort on site, the best ah chance of recovery there is.
00:16:36
Speaker
But the more elegant one is actually leveraging your buying power. And so we had this example with one of our aged care customers where they couldn't recycle the plastic wrap that was coming around their timber bundles and because the size of the logo was too large. So they went to the supplier, which is a large, really large construction supplier here, and said, we need a smaller logo on that. And once once they got the smaller logo, made sure that the logo wasn't in colour, it was just black and white, then the people that actually recycle it could take it as an input product.
00:17:08
Speaker
So I think that if you can work with your suppliers ah to reduce the amount of product waste they give you, i am I sat on Skip the Skips, which was a sort government-funded idea around how can we reduce our waste.
00:17:23
Speaker
And we had this session at the end of it where we had all these people that worked on a project looking at the waste on the walls. And the one thing that they saw was how much packaging waste. So we had light bulbs inside concrete...
00:17:35
Speaker
so like ah fittings inside of a cardboard box, inside of another cardboard box, inside of another cardboard box. If you can yeah remove that ah waste, it can make a difference. So working with your suppliers to reduce the waste they give you at the front end, i think, would make a difference.
Podcast Conclusion and Call to Action
00:17:51
Speaker
We learned a lot from our visit. Recycling isn't easy, but when done right, we can recover a good portion of our infrastructure materials, especially concrete, steel, jib, and timber. We also learned that the simple act of higher waste levies encourages both more recycling and more emphasis on designing out waste.
00:18:10
Speaker
What we need now is more facilities like this one in Selman Road and less landfills. Most importantly, we have to remember that aside from food waste and green waste or general recycling like glass and plastics, the vast majority of what we throw out as individuals goes straight to landfill.
00:18:27
Speaker
That's what makes specifying recycling on infrastructure projects so important. Since these materials are the easiest to recycle, we can make a massive impact. The thing I'm passionate about is not just the recycling of it, but if you can turn it up up the waste hierarchy into yeah the same product back into products, then that's a a great outcome for us all.
00:18:47
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Infrastructure Connections. Please take a moment to follow us wherever you get your podcasts, and we want your feedback. If you're watching this on YouTube, leave us a comment below.
00:18:57
Speaker
Tell us what thoughts this episode gave you, or drop us a line at the Infrastructure Sustainability Council. Stay tuned for the next episode, coming up next on Infrastructure Connections.