Creating Wanless’ next recycling park in Queensland

At Sydney Recycling Park up to 80 per cent of the waste we receive is diverted from landfill. That’s above our nation’s resource recovery rate of 62 per cent. It’s well above the 48 per cent rate recorded for Queensland, where we plan to roll out our next recycling park. 

The Wanless Recycling Park is a proposed resource recovery, recycling and landfill precinct on an industrial site 12 kilometres southwest of Ipswich in Queensland. There we aim to use the same tried and tested model from Sydney Recycling Park to transform the degraded site into a productive precinct. 

Wanless already has a connection to this part of the country through its family history. In the late 1950s, long before recycling was a priority, Wanless started automotive and metal recycling in the Ipswich and western Brisbane regions. Since that time, the company has understood the value of working with the local community to minimise adverse impacts and share the economic and environmental benefits.  

At Sydney Recycling Park, we started with an environmentally disastrous landfill site. Some people thought we were crazy for taking it on, but we saw the opportunity to turn it around. We invested heavily to remediate the site and created a new facility that handles waste in an environmentally responsible manner. By using the world’s best technology and practices to recover and recycle as much as possible, we have significantly reduced the amount of waste going to landfill. 

At the new Queensland site, we have an opportunity to integrate various resource recovery and reuse activities that will generate many more employment and training opportunities for the local community than landfill operations. We also have the space to build and operate an innovative resource recovery hub that will continue to evolve as new technologies emerge and new markets for recovered materials open up.  

In early December, Wanless is holding drop-in community information sessions in the Ipswich area to share preliminary information about the proposed development with residents. For further details, email [email protected] or register to attend here.