Sydney is fast running out of landfill and an “emerging weak link” in the plan for how the city manages solid waste in the future could see uncollected garbage left piling up at hospitals and other businesses, experts warn.
Sydney has increasingly been sending its waste out of the city and its dwindling landfill capacities have long been acknowledged by the industry and relevant authorities. Some experts estimate Sydney will no longer be able to bury any of its own rubbish within city limits from as early as 2028.
The New South Wales Environment Protection Authority (EPA) is slightly more optimistic, projecting that capacity at Sydney’s four remaining active landfill sites – including at Eastern Creek and near the Lucas Heights nuclear site – will fall short of demand from 2030.
Solid waste generated by Sydney’s more than 5 million residents and businesses is carried by freight trains to regional landfill sites. But advocacy group and urban thinktank the Committee for Sydney argues this is not sustainable due to a “weak link” in the city’s infrastructure.
In its report – No weak links: limiting the impact of infrastructure failure on Sydney’s essential services – released on Wednesday, the committee warns that Sydney’s strategy of sending solid waste by rail out of the city depends on ageing tracks that have previously been shut down for multiple days in a row due to the rail infrastructure’s vulnerability to intense rain and flooding.
For years, Sydney has been sending some of its solid waste by train to be buried outside the city, with one of the main destinations the decommissioned Woodlawn mine-turned landfill site next to Tarago, about 40km south-west of Goulburn. The site is operated by waste management company Veolia.
At least one large freight train leaves a facility in Clyde in Sydney each day packed with putrescible waste – matter that readily decomposes, including household waste and foods – bound for the Woodlawn facility. About 1m tonnes of the solid waste is sent there each year, according to government figures.
During the flooding that hit Australia’s east coast in 2022, the solid waste rail services were disrupted for 10 days in the year after the train tracks to Tarago were affected by the heavy rain.
This resulted in “councils, hospitals and commercial buildings having to store their own waste, as household collections were prioritised for public health reasons”, the committee’s report said.
That could be a glimpse into Sydney’s future without better planning of infrastructure, said Sam Kernaghan, the Committee for Sydney’s director of resilience and author of the report.
“With Sydney’s landfill reaching capacity by 2028, and waste volumes continuing to grow, the vulnerability of the waste system to rail disruptions are expected to grow into the future,” the report said.
He said: “Effectively the train is Sydney’s option, so when we have major floods, you are cutting off that link, and you have got waste backing up in storage, in local council storage, in commercial buildings, in hospitals.”
Kernaghan said that, unlike power, water and transport, solid waste is not considered “critical” infrastructure under Australian legislation. He argues that planners should consider it essential and better plan for outages and build redundancies.
“It’s essential to the functioning of the city,” Kernaghan said.
Flooding events had already exacerbated the shortage of landfill, with deluges in 2021 and 2022 generating “huge amounts of waste”.
“We’ve overshot our waste budget for those years quite significantly,” Kernaghan said.
Philip Laird, a rail expert and associate professor at the Wollongong University, said the rail tracks relied on for solid waste services across much of NSW were in a poor state, including the line to the Tarago landfill facility.
Laird described the line as “worse than old”.
“It has had maintenance issues leading to a lot of temporary speed restrictions too,” he said.
A NSW EPA spokesperson said: “We’re working with industry and councils to understand the challenges to infrastructure investment and to identify opportunities to address them.”
• This article was amended on 5 July 2024 to correct the name of the Environment Protection Authority. A previous version referred to the Environmental Protection Agency, which is the US body.
