Revealed: $13m plan to extend life of Toowoomba's main landfill

Toowoomba's main landfill will extend its life by five years through a $13m vertical expansion project, which will also turn waste into power for a key facility.

The Toowoomba Waste Management Centre on Bedford Street is being expanded. Photo Kevin Farmer / The Chronicle Helicopter services courtesy of Heliwest Group

The life of Toowoomba’s main landfill will be extended by another five years as part of a $13m vertical expansion project.

Work has started on extensions to the Toowoomba Waste Management Centre at Cranley, which will add another 500,000 cubic metres through the creation of two lined cells.

The works act as stages three and four of the six-stage vertical expansion, which was the first of its kind in Australia when it began in 2017.

Council’s waste services portfolio spokeswoman Melissa Taylor said the project, being completed by Hazel Bros, would extended the life of the Cranley site until 2031.

“Maximising landfill space by vertical expansion and extension onsite to the west is far cheaper than establishing landfill operations at a new landfill site and offers better environmental safeguards,” she said.

Councillor Melissa Taylor welcomed the expansion. Picture: Kevin Farmer

The project involves multiple liners within the cell above a drainage aggregate layer made of clay and rock containing the leachate system that is designed to capture any liquid into tanks.

About 49,000 tonnes of clay, gravel and rock would be sourced from local quarries to create the drainage layer.

Ms Taylor said the council would also commission a new leachate system to ensure it remained compliant with the conditions of its environmental authority (EA) over the site.

The cells would also see the expansion of pipes installed to collect gas produced by landfill to power council’s nearby Wetalla wastewater reclamation facility via a 1000 kilowatt gas-fired generator.

Ms Taylor said the gas-to-energy project, done in conjunction with green energy firm LGI, had saved the council about $600,000 a year in electricity costs.

“It's extraordinary – this is hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of savings every year in just power generation,” she said.

“It’s a great collaboration between TRC and LGI from a sustainability perspective but also an environmental perspective and also a cost-saving perspective.”

The works, which were included in this year’s budget, come as the council grapples with the increasing cost of disposing of garbage and the impacts of the state government’s waste levy — which mayor Geoff McDonald has called a “bin tax”.

The levy was worth $14.7m to council in 2024-25, with the government arbitrarily subsidising $5.3m to lessen the blow.

Currently set at $125 a tonne, the levy will increase to $145 a tonne by 2027-28.

Ms Taylor said Queensland’s two tiers of government needed to have a rethink of how waste management was handled.

The The Greater Toowoomba Waste Management Facility. Photo McNab

“I’m actually on two state waste advisory committees through my portfolio here, which is great,” she said.

“There is a statewide waste strategy review currently and TRC will also review their waste strategy as well, so there is a lot happening in this space because of exactly that reason (of cost).

“What will be happening in the future, and I have seen the graphs, is that the state waste levy will increase and then that subsidy that they’re giving is decreasing (and) that shortfall is going to be ever-increasing.”

‘Up to 10 bins’: Council to ramp up waste diversion efforts

The Toowoomba Regional Council is reviewing its waste strategy to improve diversion efforts.

Toowoomba Regional Council will ramp up its efforts to divert waste from landfill, leaving the door open for new bins dedicated to specific resources like food scraps.

Councillor Melissa Taylor said the council was reviewing its waste strategy in response to the increasing cost of the state government’s waste levy on ratepayer.

However, she said residents could start making an immediate change to assist the council by ordering a green waste bin for items like grass clippings, tree branches and other vegetative material.

“One of the biggest issues that we have with the diversion is green waste, which is trees and grass clippings and hedging and all of that, going into the red bin,” Ms Taylor said.

“That’s a major, major issue, so we’re really encouraging residents to look at getting a green-lidded bin to actually really assist with the diversion.

“There’s lots of different ways of attacking this but we actually have to start looking at waste as a resource – you’ve got biofuels and how we treat our waste.”

Non-food green waste bins are offered by just 11 of Queensland’s 78 councils, with the state failing to reach a target set in 2022 of having 65 per cent of homes with a green-lidded bin by this year.

Food scraps currently can’t be thrown into the green bin, with Ms Taylor noting the TRC was looking at the results of trials involving bio-waste being run in other council areas.

However, she said nothing was being ruled out as part of the strategy review.

“There are trials in Queensland at the moment for food waste and also in NSW, so it’s really a matter of watching and looking to see what the outcomes of these trials are,” Ms Taylor said.

“We don’t want to throw good money after bad by not having the right way of doing it.

“If you look at Denmark and the capital city, Copenhagen – when I was over there, some households have got up to 10 bins and that’s how they divert waste.

“We’ve got a lot of catching up to do here in Australia and for me, I believe it’s a real education process.”