We’re improving the Chatham Islands’ solid waste management through robust infrastructure and innovative advancements

Chatham Islands Solid Waste Management

Chatham Islands Council (CIC) has been on a long journey of improving its solid waste management capacity, and we’re proud to play a critical role. Since the early 2000s, our engineers, planners and scientists have been working with CIC to implement a variety of efficient, sustainable solutions.

Our team has been busy developing solid waste management and minimization plans, helping to define solid waste bylaw, and procuring an appropriate landfill site. We thoroughly assessed our options and identified the issues related to collecting waste and recycling in this remote environment. By procuring funding, we had the means to achieve strategic goals of strengthening and extending numerous aspects of CIC’s solid waste management response—some realized, others ongoing. When designing the landfill, the location’s unique issues required creative solutions. Take the landfill’s lack of power for example—the team designed a leachate drainage system that flows by gravity, making use of a dosing siphon to flush leachate periodically to the pilot leachate treatment plant.

At all stages of this long-standing project, our dedicated involvement has been broad. By building strong relationships with both CIC and its contractors, our collective innovation has made strides toward a cleaner future.