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What is Cleaner Production?

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Cleaner Production is about minimising the ecological impacts of our commercial and industrial activity, while maximising the benefits gained from any raw materials or resources we consume.

Cleaner Production aims to:

• Minimise the creation of wastes and environmental contaminants,
• Reduce overall cost and add market advantage,
• Increase resource-use efficiency and utilisation,
• Benefit the environment, and
• Encourage a sustainable society.

Other aims of cleaner production may extend to involve the full life cycle costs of your products, including their ultimate disposal by consumers after use, and any environmental impacts associated with their use.

Adopting a Cleaner Production approach within your business may involve:

• Modifying your product to reduce its environmental impact
• Substituting raw material inputs with less toxic alternatives
• Changing your production processes and technologies used
• Resource recovery, re-use, and recycling within your own business, and
• Good administration and procedures to minimise the risks of spills or leaks

The goal of any Cleaner Production initiatives within your business should be to:

• Conserve raw materials, energy and water, and
• Reduce the toxicity and amount of wastes and pollutants being created.

Links to On-Line Resources

To find out more about the opportunities for Cleaner Production in your own business, and the support and resources available to industries in Western Australia, you are encouraged to visit the following sites:

• Curtin University Centre of Excellence in Cleaner Production
• Swan River Trust – Swan Canning Cleanup Program
• Waste Wise WA (an initiative of the DEP)
• WasteNet (mainly dealing with solid waste)
• Environment Australia – Eco Efficiency and Cleaner Production (a Federal Government initiative)
• Environment Australia – Home Page

Cleaner Production and the Industrial Waste Service

The Water Corporation is committed to pursuing the long term sustainability of our business, and the community we serve. We are signatories to the Western Australian Sustainable Industry Group (WA SIG), and we actively encourage Cleaner Production practices amongst our customers and suppliers.

Our policy recognises that the public wastewater system – although designed primarily for domestic wastewater - is well adapted to handle many of the wastewater streams generated by commercial and industrial activities. Consequently, we offer the Industrial Waste service as an alternative disposal option for our commercial and industrial customers, who may have wastewater disposal needs.

Our policy is to encourage the optimal use of the public wastewater system for Industrial Waste, and encourage the most economically and ecologically efficient methods of handling industrial wastewater. We would encourage you to use our service where it is appropriate, but would discourage its use where more economically and ecologically efficient disposal methods are available.

Encouraging Optimal Use of Sewer Discharge

Our pricing principles and charging structure provide a strong incentive for customers to optimise their waste management solutions, and offer further rewards for broader waste minimisation and Cleaner Production outcomes.

Firstly, our principle of full cost recovery ensures that our Industrial Waste service properly reflects the actual costs of treatment and disposal. Full cost recovery leads to positive environmental outcomes, by:

• Ensuring a level playing field for other waste management options and independent service providers, who might otherwise be disadvantaged by cross-subsidies and artificially low prices for competing alternatives.
• Not artificially discounting the real gains to be made from waste minimisation or cleaner production within your operation.

Ultimately, full cost recovery will allow economically and ecologically viable waste management alternatives to flourish, and will encourage a greater range of options to be made available within the market.

User pays charges, and Quality-Quantity charges in particular, provide strong pricing incentives for businesses to consider their waste management options, and their own opportunities for cleaner production and waste minimisation. You can reduce your Quality-Quantity charges by adopting Cleaner Production initiatives, such as:

• Pre-treatment or other process changes to reduce the strength of your wastewater discharge.
• Process changes to reduce the amount of waste by-products, or to increase the efficiency of raw material utilisation within your process, to reduce the load of contaminants in your wastewater.
• Pre-treatment to allow resource recovery of excess reagents or unused ingredients, extracting them prior to discharge. There may be a market for these by-products, or you may be able to re-use them yourself, and save on your input costs as well as your discharge costs.
• Pre-treatment or other process changes to allow internal re-use of your treated wastewater. This will offset your water supply needs, and save input costs, as well as reducing your Industrial Waste volumes.

• Consideration of alternative disposal methods, to find a more economically efficient approach to you waste management needs. You may be able to substitute a cheaper waste disposal option for a portion of your current Industrial Waste volume, or abandon more costly options in favour of sewer discharge.  Pre-treatment or other process changes to reduce the strength of your wastewater discharge.

• Consideration of alternative disposal methods, to find a more ecologically and economically efficient approach to your waste management needs.

Our pricing is structured to reflect the true cost of treatment and disposal of Industrial Wastes. This includes a proper reflection of environmental costs, including the costs of any actions we take to mitigate potential ecological impacts, and the charges levied on us for our use of  the environment’s capacity to safely absorb any residual contaminants.

We have deliberately chosen this true-cost pricing structure, including environmental costs, to encourage the most ecologically efficient methods for waste management within our modern society.

Any efforts you make to reduce the environmental demands associated with your waste management practices will translate to real savings in the charges for our service. And by optimising your choice of disposal methods so as to lower your overall costs, you will also be ensuring the best possible environmental outcomes for our community as a whole.

Solahart Industries Case Study

Solahart Industries have installed a sophisticated treatment plant to remove chrome, nickel and other contaminants from wastewater at their Kewdale factory.