Arcadis, the leading global Design & Consultancy for natural and built assets, presented at this year’s Coffs Harbour Waste Conference, the key conference for the waste management industry in Australia which took place on 5-7 May 2019.
Several speakers from leading waste management professionals talked about the
latest developments in the industry. The exhibition was visited by national and international companies, where they could expand their network with other 'waste experts' during the three social evenings.
Arcadis’s senior environmental consultant Charlotte Wesley presented during the Coffs Harbour Waste Conference with the purpose to highlight the opportunities that digitisation presents to the Australian Waste Industry. Digitisation is the process of transferring information into a digital format, such that it can be used for real time tracking, predictive analysis or visualisation.
Charlotte Wesley, Senior Environmental Consultant, Waste Advisory at Arcadis: ‘‘Within the Australian waste industry, it has the capacity to increase our efficiency of operations, highlight issues before they happen and improve comprehension of complex environmental issues through emerging communication mediums such as virtual reality. Rather than fear automation of tasks, industry needs to recognise the opportunity this presents.’’
‘‘Many government organisations find it difficult to retrieve basic data, which is critical to performance benchmarking. The challenges of retrieving and validating data for national accounts and specialist studies is repeated year after year at great expense to the organisations, with little improvements. Managers within these organisations also have little oversight into the critical financial and operational information such as landfill airspace consumption, compaction rates and actual disposal costs. Digitisation of data will make this critical information more readily available to staff,’’ said Wesley.
Improved data tracking and the emergence of new technologies will facilitate material tracking and accounting, and subsequently recycling potential. As we move to a circular economy with resource conservation, recycling and energy co-generation, the availability of information on material flows in real-time will make it easier for industry to work together. Similarly, this would also benefit industry in terms of product tracking and demonstrating compliance.