geocycle industrial waste disposal study / geocycle industrial waste disposal pg 6 “we asked...

Case study INdustRIaL

Geocycle Industrial Waste DisposalConnecting you to a more sustainable future

Case Study / Geocycle Industrial Waste disposal pg 2

Don’t waste it, re-use it

While the chemicals that deliver pest-free crops, smoother-running vehicles, advanced paints, stickier glues and more powerful cleaning products provide us with better standards of living, there is also a significant downside to their manufacture – what to do with the chemical waste and dangerous by-products?

Not too long ago we would have dumped them in landfill, but have since learned that as these hydrocarbon-based products decompose they can contaminate the soil, release greenhouse gases into the air and even leach into the water table.

But now, by preventing these waste materials from entering landfill, recovering the materials’ energy and substituting it for coal in direct-fired cement kilns, natural resources are saved, landfill is reduced and the impact on the environment is lessened.

Geocycle, in Melbourne’s south-east, is making a difference to the sustainability of many industries by converting hazardous waste materials into fuel and sending it to large kilns in Queensland and Tasmania where cement is made.

This waste-derived fuel has the potential to lower CO2 emissions by 18 percent compared with the use of coal.

Based in Dandenong South, Geocycle, a fully-owned subsidiary of Cement Australia, is a recycling plant equipped with Australia’s first hybrid ‘superblender’ that blends hazardous solids with waste solvents then ships this alternative fuel to the cement kilns.

Using the superblender (nicknamed ‘Bob’ – big oversized blender) there’s no need to remove the dangerous goods from their steel drums as the unit shreds and cleans the metal and sets it aside for collection by steel recyclers. Bob is responsible for around 30-40 percent of the entire plant’s fuel production activities.


An industry that keeps growing

What began as a small recycling and solvent recovery plant in 1986, Geocycle has been transformed into an important partner in the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) plans for a more sustainable Victoria.

“Not long ago, the Geocycle plant underwent a major $4.5 million overhaul in order to accommodate increasing supplies of hazardous materials,” says Geocycle Production Manager Frank Zanetti. “The expansion comprised new equipment (including Bob), a new power supply for the plant, together with controls for the new equipment and a SCADA system for overseeing operations. SCADA is an acronym for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition – an on-screen visual representation of plant operations.

In keeping with its environmentally-friendly tag, Geocycle sought the services of an electrical engineering and contracting company that could provide its energy requirements as efficiently as possible.

EcoSmart Electricians-accredited contractors, Gordyn and Palmer, located not far from Geocycle, were chosen to provide those services to Geocycle.

“We had to produce real energy savings within the operation to ensure the plant’s long-term viability,” says Gordyn and Palmer’s Project Manager Ian Denny. “The additional equipment was going to demand far too much of the old system. Plus Geocycle wanted better control of its operations.

“It was a real partnership between us and Geocyle to deliver the job on time and on budget.”

How it works

Each day, truckloads of 200-litre drums and mini skips of solid wastes are delivered to the site. A pallet of four drums at a time or a single mini skip is lifted 12m and tipped into a nitrogen inerted airlock chamber prior to being dropped into an auger shredder. The system can process 30 drums per hour.

The shredder reduces the waste into pieces of less than 150mm that are then extruded to a liquid high-speed dispersion mixing tank. This custom-made tank has a magnetic extraction conveyor to remove the shredded metal drum pieces. The remaining hazardous waste is further reduced in size to less than 8mm through two more reduction steps, while being homogenised into a highly controlled fuel product.

“The solids we receive are usually dry paint, resins, off-spec materials like inks, waxes and tars that have hardened over time or are sludgy by nature. We shred the drums, separate the metal for washing and recycling, and the remaining hazardous sludgy material gets blended into a lighter solvent material, which produces a very homogenised product that forms the basis of the final fuel product we ship to our cement kilns,” says Frank.


The waste-derived fuels Geocycle supply are around the viscosity of very light oil for the Gladstone (Queensland) cement kiln, whereas the cement kiln in Tasmania can operate on a product that is more like a thicker engine oil.

“It’s an interesting area of our process to get the mixture right – taking solids and liquids with differing characteristics and combining them to get a fuel with the right viscosity and energy content,” says Frank.

“We receive annually around 7 million litres of liquid hazardous waste that we use to blend our solid material into,” he says. “The problem we face is that we can’t blend sludge with sludge or paste with paste – it’s too thick to pump into the cement kilns. The fuel product that we make is made to a fairly strict specification with respect to chemistry and physical properties.

“We have a laboratory with state-of-the-art analytical test equipment,” he adds. “And we closely monitor every step of the process to achieve the best possible fuel product for our cement kilns.

“We spent many years researching what other advanced fuel blending platforms do around the world before deciding to go with the drum-shredding system we have deployed. This particular system design also allows for significant future growth as we believe the market demand will increase. Without the drum-shredding capability, we had a hard time processing a solid drum. It’s the only system of its kind in the world using this specific equipment. Some of it was custom designed just for us and other associated parts had to be adapted to our situation.

“Gordyn and Palmer totally redesigned our plant’s power supply and set up the infrastructure to run this beast,” Frank says. “This also provided us with significant scope for future upgrades and expansion.”


The task

At the height of the project, Gordyn and Palmer had more than 20 personnel working on the project on and off-site.

“Innovation was the key to the success of this project,” says Ian. “We undertook a complete infrastructure upgrade not only to operate the drum-shredding and fuel-blending plant, but also what was required to eventually expand and operate the entire site.

“We had very limited information from the overseas machinery supplier on the operation of some of the equipment and needed to make a number of mechanical changes during the installation. We then were required to utilise our senior, more experienced electricians to ensure the installation ran smoothly.

“Hence, we undertook a significant amount of R&D to reach Geocycle’s desired outcome,” says Ian.

Electrical equipment was selected from companies with a track record of support for continuity of supply, quality product and reliability.

Specially-developed software by Gordyn and Palmer’s engineers gives operators full control of the process including high level monitoring and alarming, ensuring the process remains within the design parameters and reduces energy consumption by as much as 20 percent of that of regular control operations.

The unique SCADA system also allows Geocycle engineers to fine tune the process, allowing the plant to process in excess of 6 tonnes of solid waste per hour.

“We provided a solution based on the implementation of individual current monitoring of all motors in conjunction with level and pressure sensing throughout the plant. These allow for the balancing of load through the process maximising production and reducing overall kilowatt per kg of processed fuel,” says Ian.

“It also reduces the use of plant ancillaries like compressed air, nitrogen and water (Geocycle captures most of its own water).

Credentials

Frank says: “I’ve been at Geocycle almost 19 years and Gordyn and Palmer was working at this site before that, carrying out electrical work. When it came to the upgrade there was no doubt in our minds that Gordyn and Palmer was the right company to handle the electrical engineering components. The company had a very good understanding of what we wanted to achieve because it had gathered great knowledge about our business and the requirements to take it to where we wanted it to go.

“Gordyn and Palmer did an excellent job project managing the electrical works, which were substantial.


“We asked Gordyn and Palmer to factor energy-efficiency into its design and were delighted with the outcome. We asked for high-efficiency motors and to explore the use of the latest technology in order to keep our carbon footprint as small as possible.

“We feel we’ve definitely achieved that by using new state-of-the-art PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers - digital computers used in electromechanical processes) and a digital delivery system utilising fibre optics and Ethernet connectivity, rather than the old-fashioned power-hungry switchgear. This new installation and SCADA system allows us to access so much more data to ascertain how efficiently the equipment is operating, monitor the plant to determine maintenance needs, discover where further energy savings can be made and monitor the process in detail,” adds Frank.

“Gordyn and Palmer’s knowledge of current technology and how to implement it has certainly saved us a lot of money, not just in plant efficiencies but also advising which equipment was most suitable for our process.

“The control system for the shredder came with old-fashioned switchgear. We asked Gordyn and Palmer to devise a new computerised system and they provided us with this great SCADA system. We couldn’t be happier.

“The site power upgrade has resulted in the capability to draw on three times the power that we were able to, which leaves us plenty of scope for equipment upgrades to handle the increasing recycling demands of many of Victoria’s industries.

“It’s been a fairly steep learning curve for all of us but the relationship we have with Gordyn and Palmer has certainly made things easier.”

Processing progress

“By July 2010 we’ve processed 10,700 tonnes of waste product, at that rate we’ll complete about 18,000 tonnes in 2010 - a really good result that is about 15 percent above budget,” says Frank, proudly.

“The market is really robust at the moment, too, so there’s no shortage of materials coming into us.”

Frank says one of the drivers for all the waste is the EPA’s tightening of legislation for prescribed landfill, which is making it tougher and more expensive for companies to send their hazardous waste to traditional landfill.

“The Geocycle plant is now very competitive with landfill prices, which


makes it an attractive option to companies who prefer to see their hazardous waste turned into something useful. It also boosts their own ‘green’ credentials when they can report to shareholders that they are doing their bit for the environment,” says Frank.

“Some of the bigger companies are even employing environmental managers to look after issues like removal of waste and these people are quite astute when it comes to choosing where to send their waste products.

“We’re getting knocks on our door almost every day from companies enquiring about our services.”

Summary

Since its commissioning in June 2009, the plant has processed more than 15,000 drums and 1,000 pallets of smaller containers, which means more than 3,000 tonnes of hazardous waste has been processed into liquid cement kiln fuel. Also, productivity of high viscosity fuel has increased 300 percent, meaning a significant saving of coal used in the cement kilns.

While Geocycle is removing more and more hazardous waste from the environment, it is also recycling thousands of 200-litre metal drums.

The plant is hugely successful with the potential to grow substantially without requiring an electrical overhaul.

“We’re looking to increase our throughput to around 50-60 tonnes per day by the end of 2010,” says Frank.

“We’re not only providing industry with a safer method of disposing hazardous waste, but also providing a world-leading example of how industry can reduce CO2 emissions, and conserve energy and reduce landfill,” he says.


A little help …

The project was part funded by the Australian Government Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism via the Asia Pacific Partnership On Clean Development And Climate (AP6) and also the Victorian Environmental Protection Authority’s Hazwaste fund.

deFINItIONs Ecosmart Electrician: An EcoSmart Electrician is a licensed electrical contractor that has certification and accreditation in energy efficiency. These electricians have been professionally trained in energy efficient products, technologies and installations to assist you to save energy and money.

GORdyN aNd PaLMeR’s INPut

• Initial design and budgeting meetings• Hazard and operability studies• Engineering and approvals• 1500kVa substation design and foundation set up• Design and sourcing of switch and control room• Manufacture of switchboards, including 3,500A outdoor main distribution

and metering• MS and fully automated MCC• 2 x 300kW soft starters and 2 x 55kW soft starters all networked• Remote hazardous area control centre• Underground boring for mains installation• Extensive cable tray installation and cable protection• Optical fibre network• CCTV coverage of operations• Testing and commissioning

geocycle industrial waste disposal study / geocycle industrial waste disposal pg 6 “we asked...

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