This year (30th May – 3rd Jun) marked the 50th anniversary of the IFAT expo – the world’s leading trade fair for environmental technologies. IFAT started out back in 1966 with 147 exhibitors and 10,200 visitors and this year housed 3,097 exhibitors and around 138,000 visitors from all over the world.
Our Managing Director Paul Smith and engineering Services Manager Darren Souter were among the crowds. They spent three days taking in the sights and innovations at the large scale event and an additional day touring the impressive MARTIN Waste to Energy Plant.
Highlights of the event for both Paul and Darren included:
- Seeing how waste technologies have progressed and the realisation that Australia is not too far behind in many areas and in some even striving ahead. As far as mobile compactors go Australia seems to be the world leaders in light weight equipment that is not overly complicated.
- One new technology that stood out were recycling separation machines capable of separating different coloured glass, paper and card board, and plastics at very, very fast speeds.
- Meeting the new owners of the Wastedge system – this was timely as the KS Environmental Group has recently moved across to this platform. It was great to be able to meet up in person and express and share viewpoints and obtain a clear picture of what the goals and objectives are going forward for the Australasia region.
Technologies big in Europe at the moment seem to be waste to energy and emerging bin identification and weighing systems. With regards to the ‘waste to energy’ sector, this is something that Europe is a long way ahead of Australia in but for many reasons including the density of population and the heating need that we don’t have so much in Australia.
One particular take home item that the company looks forward to getting involved in is a new mud dehydrating system for our liquid treatment plant (OES). This system will process the drilling muds from industries like the NBN roll out and rail crossing removal programs under way in Melbourne.
We will keep you posted as the project moves forward!
