Proactive Dust Management for Rock Quarry
Skills: air quality management plans, dust management, licence amendment
environmental approvals, weather forecasting
Quarry Products needed an expert’s opinion on the dust management approaches used at its quarry in Toowoomba. In particular, they needed assistance to negotiate with the regulator to determine new environmental approval conditions that were reasonable, practical and effective.
Katestone studied the quarry’s operations, which included ranking on-site activities in terms of how much dust they were likely to generate. We also compared existing dust control measures against best practice. This analysis provided Quarry Products with a better understanding of how its activities might generate dust and from this we were able to recommend dust management measures aimed at the largest dust-generating activities on-site.
After working through these options with Quarry Products, we negotiated with the regulators to include those measures that were practical and achievable.
One of the key requirements from the regulator was for a proactive management system that would alert the quarry of potentially dusty days prior to the event. To achieve this we developed an alert system to notify staff of upcoming weather conditions that are more likely to result in high dust emissions using our KITE weather intelligence system. This proactive approach allows site activities to be planned and altered to ensure effective dust management.
Our involvement resulted in new licence conditions that:
- reflect best-practice approaches
- target the most significant dust-generating activities
- were accepted by the regulators
- are practical and achievable for the quarry