Komatsu with iMC delivers for Vic council

The Shire of Corangamite to Melbourne’s west says Komatsu’s latest positioning and machine control technology has lifted the efficiency of its Komatsu D85EXi-18 dozer by around 40 per cent, allowing it to carry out landfill cell construction and waste management both more quickly and more affordably.

The council took delivery of the dozer in September 2019 to work on its landfill operation at Naroghid, the Corangamite Regional Landfill.

The landfill operation is on a 39ha site and handles around 32,000 tonnes of waste to landfill material a year, not only for Corangamite residents, but also for the adjacent shires of Warrnambool and Colac Otway and Southern Grampians.

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During the drier summer months, the dozer is being used for construction of the waste cells and leachate ponds – which must be constructed to strict EPA requirements.

It is also used for pushing and spreading waste material year-round, covering it each day with 300mm of daily cover material, then capping the waste with materials including clay and topsoil once each cell is filled.

“When we construct new cells we work to strict design requirements for their shape, things like 3:1 batters, batter heights, and how high the rubbish can go,” said Glenn Busuttil, Corangamite’s Team Leader Waste at the Corangamite Regional Landfill.

Over the past eight years, Corangamite has brought in contractors and surveyors to carry out this cell construction work, but it’s now able to do it by transferring the designs to the iMC dozer’s onboard system, with the dozer then working in with the assisting scrapers and excavators.

The iMC dozer was also used to place a capping layer – consisting of 1.5m of clay, overlaid with around 800mm of soil and topsoil – to top off a filled waste cell.

“Doing these jobs this time, once we had the design, we had a surveyor working with us, helping to calibrate the machine, and checking all the as-builts it was generating as we went,” said Glenn.

“It was a much faster job with this technology. What was previously a 10-week job on constructing the cell, we completed in around six weeks.” That’s a 40 per cent productivity improvement.

The council also says the dozer’s iMC technology is making the day-to-day landfill operations faster and more efficient.

“Each day, we spread out the waste we’ve received that day, then cover it with 300mm of soil. The technology’s able to help with that, make sure that’s all a bit more accurate,” said Glenn.

“One issue with waste is that, due to its nature, you can’t put in pegs and stringlines, so typically we’ve had to put in a windrow of clay each day to give us a rough level to work off. Having the iMC machine do this makes it all much faster and more accurately.

“In addition, during this process, the dozer can also take the levels of waste that we’re putting down, using the RLs to give us the as-builts. Each month, we give these to the surveyors, and because we know the volumes of waste we’re receiving, we can work out our compaction rates over the site, how much waste we can get into a certain area.”

Glenn said that while the primary goal has been to work more efficiently, save money and carry out this work faster, the council’s ambition has also been for its own operators and workers be able to do the job themselves, rather than have it contracted out.

“Now they are learning how to use GPS technology themselves,” he said. “All our operators are local people, and they’ve not had the opportunity to work with this technology before; we’ve never had it on our machines at the landfill previously.

“This opportunity to train our own local people, our own council employees, is really exciting. And they absolutely love it; now they feel they can operate equipment on a range of sites and to a high level in the future.

“The technology is absolutely proving itself for this application. And once we bring in our own base station, which we’re planning to do, that will take us to a whole new level.

“Applying this technology lets us deliver more efficient waste management for our ratepayers and adjacent councils, it is a better use of resources, and it’s saving money.”