The Copping Pilot Trial Wetland is a treatment wetland and
biofilter system
Location: Copping, Tasmania
Client: Southern Waste Solutions
Time frame: 2015 – Current
Services provided by Syrinx
Bioengineering; Constructed Wetlands and Biofilters; Ecological Engineering; Ecological Restoration; Landscape Construction and Maintenance; Water Sensitive Design
Project Phases Delivered
Project Phases Details
The Copping Pilot Trial Wetland is a treatment wetland and biofilter system
The Copping Pilot Trial Wetland is a treatment wetland and biofilter system designed to treat leachate from the Category B-Cells within the Copping Regional Landfill Facility on the Arthur Hwy near Sorell, Copping, Tasmania.
The leachate is high strength and moderate to highly saline, and regularly exceeds the capacity of the site leachate evaporation ponds, requiring costly off-site discharge and resulting in water wastage.
This system treats the leachate to a standard that enables sustainable, beneficial reuse, using a modular, novel series of phytoremediation/adsorbtion biofilters and wetlands. The combined technologies use the processes of oxidation, precipitation, aeration, adsorption, biotransformation and phytoremediation to remediate the
leachate.
Phytoremediation is a set of plant-based bioremediation technologies that use various species of living plants to clean up contaminated soils, water and air via phytostabilization, phytostimulation, phytoextraction, phytovolatilization, phytohydraulics and/or phytodegradation.
The system operates as a fully closed-circuit system, with treated leachate returned to the leachate storage lagoons for evaporation. The system was designed to allow cells to run in parallel (duplicate) to enable
experimental testing and analysis of changes side-by-side using differing hydraulic regimes, chemical loadings and treatment techniques. Irrigation and winter discharge of compliant leachate will be investigated once the efficacy of treatment is confirmed through the experimental data collected as part of the trial.
When the trial is complete, the system will be expanded to treat the full leachate stream and contribute to the sites circular economy strategies.
Key outcomes
- Construction of the system was completed in June 2020.
- Sensors and telemetry systems installed to support IoT
remote operation & monitoring. - The system was commissioned in Oct 2020 and full trial
operation commenced in Feb 2021.
