Moving mountains of waste in the desert , 2005/04/29
Jeffares & Green, the SA consulting engineering firm, has been appointed to undertake the technical design for the landfill site at the new international airport serving the capital city of Doha in the Arabian Gulf.
The site coincides with an existing waste dump containing 6.5 million cubic meters of waste that must be moved for building to continue.
“The challenges are enormous!” says project leader John Coetzee.
“Imagine moving the equivalent of 130 rugby fields, piled with three-storey high waste, a distance of 40 km in extreme weather conditions and to the tightest of deadlines and at the end of it all make it look like you were never there!” An area of approximately 85 hectares will be constructed, filled and capped in 16 months. Design challenges include a very harsh climate, a high water table and a need to minimise the visual impact of the final capped landfill.
Jeffares & Green was also contracted to cap and landscape the Bellville South landfill where the boundary is only 75 m from the residential area of Belhar, near Cape Town. That site receives about 350 000 tones of waste a year making it one of the largest waste disposal facilities receiving municipal solid waste in the metropolitan area.
The first South African company to design and specify a geosythetic clay liner for a landfill capping, Jeffares & Green was subsequently commended by the Geosynthetic Interest Group of South Africa for its innovative approach.
The consulting firm also developed the Amathole District Municipal Waste Information System (WIS) in the Eastern Cape and, in joint venture with Ingerop Africa, developed an Integrated Waste Management Plan (IWMP) for the City of Cape Town. The project, funded by USAID and administered by Mega Tech Inc, took 12 months to complete.
“The objective of this contract was to develop one using a cradle-to-grave approach that incorporated an appropriate, affordable and environment-friendly mix of solutions which will continually reduce the mass of waste requiring disposal and also service to provide a dynamic framework to manage the city’s waste stream effectively based on the waste hierarchy,” says Coetzee.
[Back]