When I talk to Gladstone residents, they often raise concerns about dust.

These community concerns are therefore a major focus of the Clean and Healthy Air for Gladstone project team, which reports back later this year. In the meantime to make sure that it is minimised, industry has continued to reduce the dust that comes from their sites.

Boyne Smelters Limited (BSL) has many good examples of this. For instance, BSL has decided that from 2014 no further waste will be stored in the site’s landfill. This decision presented two challenges, how to recycle this waste and how to store it until a recycling process is found.

The main landfill waste produced on site is a fine carbon powder. This powder is leftover after carbon scraps from the smelting process are themselves recycled. In this recycling process these scraps are broken into small chunks and mixed with fresh coke and tar. This mixture is then used to make new carbon blocks for the smelting process.

While environment staff look for ways to make use of this by-product, the carbon powder has to be stored on site.

Because the powder is so fine, it has proven difficult to store without causing dust. To form a wind resistant crust on the stockpile, environment staff have tried to water the stockpile, use chemical agents and even tried compaction.

As these attempts have had only limited success, a BSL employee used the GILG Clean and Health Air Management Program (CHAMP) to suggest a better way of stopping this dust. 

His idea was to cover the stockpile with geofabric. Geofabric is a coarse blanket that looks and feels like a giant plastic scouring pad.  As this use of geofabric is unusual, a trial has been undertaken but the early results are very promising.

This idea is a great example of CHAMP in action. As the BSL General Manager Guy Fortin told me, “In our everyday tasks we should not only be thinking about safety, quality and cost but how we can improve the environmental impacts of our site on ourselves and the community.”

To see a photo of how BSL has reduced their dust, please click here.

If you would like to have your say on our forum and don't know how, please click on this link which shows you how to register and make a comment, anonymously if you wish, cheers, Kurt.

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