The IQA Gold Environment Award, to be awarded this October at the IQA’s annual conference in Toowoomba, recognises a site’s contribution towards the advancement of environmental management in the extractive industry.
In 2015 the award, which was sponsored by Volvo Construction Equipment and its Australian distributor CJD Equipment, was conferred on Northern Territory member Keith Joy for an individual’s contribution towards environmental management.
In this instance, it was for his work on rehabilitating sand and gravel sites in the Northern Territory, and for working to develop rehabilitation guidelines that could be adopted by other quarries within the greater Darwin region.
Originally from Ireland, Keith Joy was in a “past life” a hotel manager, who had worked in that industry since the age of 13.
In 1999 he crossed over to the extractive industry and for nine years worked for L Behan Aggregates & Recycling, a third generation family-run business, in Dublin. The company specialised in aggregate, crushed concrete, sand and asphalt.
“I have worked my way up from a loader operator to all-round operator, before moving into asphalt production,” Keith said. “I worked up from there to become plant supervisor and then asphalt plant manager, where I was running four plants over two sites.
“It was at this point that I decided to go back to college to get my degree in engineering quarry management.”
In September 2008, after completing his degree, Keith Joy was offered a managerial position and emigrated to Western Australia, where he worked for Boral Shared Business Services as area manager for the Goldfields and Port Hedland. Nearly three and a half years later he relocated to Australia’s east coast, where he worked for Crushing Industries Australia. A year later Keith relocated to Darwin to join the Tomazos Group as its operations manager.
After nearly five years with Tomazos, Joy earlier this year started work as general manager of Yebna Quarries and Sands, which manages two sites at Acacia Hills and Humpty Doo in the Northern Territory.
As GM of Yebna Quarries, Keith says he has been “lucky, or unlucky enough!” to be given full run of the operation.
“The owner has stepped back from the business, giving me full control. There is not a lot that I don’t do, from sales to daily operations and planning to mines management plans and HR.
“I have been very lucky in my career to have the chance to train and manage in different parts of our business and not peg myself into just one area. I understand the business as a whole, and manage it in individual parts for the greater good.”
Joy manages a core of 10 staff at Yebna Quarries and, depending on the project or workload, can call on up to 50 more casual staff.
“If you ask me how many of them work at Yebna, then I would tell you on a good day about half of them!” he joked.
Across its Acacia and Sunday Creek sites, Yebna Quarries can, in peak periods, produce up to 500,000 tonnes of hard rock and 200,000 tonnes of sand products per year.
In addition to his professional commitments, Joy has also served as president of the NT Extractive Industries Association (EIA) and sat on the advisory board for the NT Mines Minister. He is currently chairman of the Northern Territory branch of the IQA.
REVEGETATION TRIALS
{{image2-a:r-w:300}}It was during his stint as Tomazos operations manager that Keith Joy oversaw two different post-mining revegetation trials in 2014 and 2015, which aimed to promote regrowth, reduce the impact of fire and weeds at high priority conservation sites, and raise awareness of the sites and their importance, while engaging the community as custodians. In addition to supplying heavy machinery and operators, Tomazos partnered with volunteers from Greening Australia, the Larrakia Aboriginal ranger group, students and academics from Charles Darwin University (CDU) and the NT Department of Land Resource Management to set up the second trial site.
Joy was motivated to undertake the trials because “coming from working in WA and Queensland, I was a bit taken back by the very relaxed approach to rehab in the NT. It wasn’t just from an operator stance, but also the Mines Department – there were no set guidelines for rehabilitation other than that you must do rehab!
“Upon investigation of other operators in the area, I found the main methods of rehab are to burn off all scrub and trees, stockpile overburden and, when mining is finished, use a ripper on hardened ground and spread out the overburden.”
Keith subsequently attended an EIA meeting where the topic of rehab arose, along with the need for operators to engage in trials with Greening Australia and CDU.
“I saw this as a major opportunity not just for my own company, but for the industry to have a chance to set its own guidelines for rehab that were pre-approved by the Mines Department,” he said. “My goal was to set benchmarks for different landscapes, trial different types of rehab to establish the most desired regrowth and also to maintain that growth through different seasons.”
The first trial site was a eucalypt-dominated savannah woodland off a gravel site at Finn Road, near Berry Springs. It consisted of 36 plots (10m x 20m) and 12 additional plots (10m x 10m) over an area of 11ha, and comprised seven substrate treatments and three additional variables, including fines, mixtures of topsoil and large oversize rock, undersize fines, oversize rock only and a mixture of leftover materials including trees and plants.
Treatment tube stock was planted into the bare laterite rock with the assistance of fencing poles and crowbars and conservation volunteers and students applied seed to the plots.
The second trial site was on the Howard Springs sand sheet heath at Scrubby Creek, on land leased by Boral, 30km east of Darwin, which comprised both gravel and seasonally inundated wetlands on sand plains. The sand plains cover an area of 264km2, and within this area the sand heath spanned 2259ha. About 22 per cent of this area in the past had been altered by mining and other activities. The site comprised nine plots (10m x 20m) including tube stock (in a grid order), topsoil and seed. Three plots of direct return, sandy topsoil (20m x 1.5m) from an unmined area were also established.
The Finn Road and Scrubby Creek gravel sites were cleared in stages: knocking over the bigger trees and shrubs first, then clearing smaller shrubs and grasses, and finally pushing 200m of topsoil onto the fallen shrubs to create a rehab stockpile.
This would keep the stockpile of vegetation alive, promote natural decay of the plants and shrubs within the stockpile and create natural micro-habitats. The stockpile could be sustained during the dry season by wetting it down and regularly spraying it for weeds, thus promoting natural growth of plants and grasses.
On both sites, Joy employed what he described as the “paddock dumping style of rehab”.
{{image3-a:l-w:300}}“It creates a small island on your site that will promote rehab, create micro-habitats, slow water erosion and limit the spread of weeds,” Joy said. “When weeds do establish themselves on-site, the paddock system makes it easier to target them.”
Consideration was also given to fire management and erosion control and ground run-off (see Figure 1). To head off the risk of fire, three-metre wide fire breaks (strips of open space in bushland) were created in the earliest days of mining the sites, and maintained through the mining and rehabilitation stages.
To counteract run-off, vegetation debris was spread over the mined area with the topsoil to create protective mulch. Paddock dumping in a random pattern slowed and interrupted groundwater flow, and there were no steep decants or gullies. The rehab material was blended before placement to ensure a good mixture of different size material could establish growth.
As Scrubby Creek consisted of sand as well as gravel, there was an additional approach to the rehabilitation process. For the sand sheet heath, the hydrology also had to be considered, as sand sheet plants are sensitive to water levels and how it flows. Most plants prefer shallow water (two to eight centimetres) in the peak of the wet season. To achieve optimum hydrology for high conservation sand sheet species:
- Slopes had to be less than five per cent (a one-metre decline in 20m depth).
- The gradient of the site had to be as gentle as possible, yet span the greatest possible area.
- There had to be shallow swales across the gradient to encourage water seepage (not flows).
- The surface had to be rough, not smooth.
- An uninterrupted slope had to be maintained from adjacent woodland areas to the rehabilitated sand sheet.
Weed control was essential, as Joy reported experiencing major problems on the Finn Road lot when the site was left unmaintained for six months.
“It’s now contaminated with Gamba grass and Mission grass,” he said, “and has to be sprayed twice a year in accordance with the weed management plan.
“However, every wet season the weeds come back heavier than previous years, so it makes it impossible to eliminate them from the site. This site may be under care and maintenance for another five years.”
Results at the trial sites showed varying degrees of success. Different rehab plots at the Finn Road site promoted regrowth of native plants and grasses in different time frames. Areas with a mixture of topsoil and fine material enjoyed the fastest regrowth of the grasses and light scrub but suffered in the wet season, while areas with tube stock started well but fell away when the clay fines mixture didn’t hold the necessary nutrients. The areas containing a mixture of clay, fines and medium rock also promoted regrowth, albeit at a slower pace.
At the Scrubby Creek site, there was successful regrowth in the gravel and sand areas. About 3800 tube stock was grown from collected seed, 1850 tube stock was planted into pots (plus 1250 given to community plantings), 1.2kg of seed was sown into plots and pre-measured into 195 bags to equal the same amount of seeds per species in each plot, and 450 10-litre buckets of sandy topsoil were moved 600m onto the trial plots. In all, 23 plant species – nine for sand, 14 for gravel – were planted at Scrubby Creek.
{{image4-a:r-w:300}}On 24 May, 2015, Keith Joy, on behalf of Tomazos and in conjunction with Greening Australia and the Top End Native Plant Society, organised a community field day at Scrubby Creek to raise awareness of the Howard Springs sand sheet landscape.
Local and territory government members, including the mayor for Litchfield, attended. Several academics presented on the importance of the landscape as a water source and provided insights into the complex hydrology of the area.
The CEO of the EIA also spoke about the importance of the landscape as a sand resource and how organisations could collaborate post-mining on revegetation solutions and improving guidelines for mining and quarrying operators.
PUSHING FOR BETTER
The trials are ongoing and Keith Joy has submitted results of the second trial as part of recommended rehabilitation guidelines to the NT Department of Mines.
He also submitted this information to the IQA as part of his entry for the Environment Award.
Keith is uncertain how many of the trials will be implemented as part of formal rehabilitation guidelines, but argues it is a worthy model to follow.
“My project is not perfect and each site is different, with a range of different challenges, but it is a guideline and it has proven results,” Keith said.
“Whether it is used as only a guideline or set as a benchmark, it doesn’t matter, it is better to have something like this than not at all.”
Indeed, as the NT mining season draws to a close, Joy added he would undertake his “rehab style” on Yebna Quarries’ own sand leases.
Keith Joy said he felt vindicated after receiving the Environment Award.
“To me personally, it was recognition for two years of planning and developing a rehab system that worked, and to have your peers deem it worthy of an award is very humbling,” he said.
“Tomazos were also given a boost within the marketplace. The company was proud of what I had achieved and it was not long before they could see the benefits of being an award-winning company.
“We worked closer and better with the Mines Department, we started looking at other areas in our business that we could improve on, and other companies took notice too.
“It looks good on a business tender when you state that your company is the winner of an environmental award.”
Joy used the proceeds from the award to further his professional development, by visiting quarry operators in the UK and Ireland that he had known over the years and also visiting a CDE Global recycling plant in Glasgow, Scotland.
“I took some time out of my trip to investigate concrete and demo recycling,” he said. “Many years ago I used recycled asphalt products in my asphalt production and I knew that the concrete guys were doing this too, so visiting some old haunts brought me up to speed with what they are doing now.
“The trip to Glasgow was by far the best. I remembered Glasgow as a dark, grey, cold and wet place – and I wasn’t wrong – but the operation that CDE had set up there was amazing. Seeing the demo [construction and demolition materials] being washed, scrubbed, screened and ending up as clean separate aggs and sand ready for resale was eye-opening. This plant could be really beneficial to the industry in build-up areas, eliminating the need for demo to go to landfill and turning it into a useful reusable product.”
Yebna Quarries and its managing director Darren McKenna fully support Keith in his next project on recycling products and the benefits that it will bring to the quarrying industry. Their vision mirrors his – that is, to work for a better, smarter, cleaner and safer industry, not so that just one company can benefit but for all who want to and are willing to change.
Like his rehab trials, Keith Joy considers the recycling plant to be an example of how “innovation and invention are brought about by necessity. It doesn’t matter if your project works first time or fails, the thing is you need to keep pushing to make things better than they were. Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb that worked first go, he had to invent 100 light bulbs that didn’t work first before hitting on the right one. Ask ‘Why not?’ rather than ‘Why?’!”
To find out more about the IQA Awards, including the Gold Environment Award, and how to apply or nominate a colleague or business, visit quarry.com.au/Networking/Awards/2017AwardInformation.aspx
Applications and nominations close on 31 Aug 2017.