Queensland Alumina Limited (QAL) made great strides to reduce environmental risks under the 5-Year Environment Strategy during 2023, while also delivering great outcomes for the Gladstone community.
Since the strategy commenced in 2018, $418 million has been spent, including $175 million within the Gladstone region, on more than 60 projects classed under key focus areas of dust, alkali, odour, water, land and noise.
“We’re moving our operations forward to keep in step with our community’s expectations for environmental performance,” said General Manager, Trent Scherer.
“To do this, our teams joined forces with global experts to problem-solve complex operational challenges and, last year alone, we brought over 30 projects into the completion phase.”
QAL has tackled dust emissions by adopting state-of-the-art dust containment technology on a brand-new alumina shiploader, implemented better controls on our alkali containment systems, expanded our water-holding capacity to more effectively treat onsite waste streams and engineered new systems to minimise major sources of odour in the community.
“By retrofitting our complex 57-year-old refinery with the latest technology to achieve these great outcomes, we’re demonstrating QAL’s commitment to improved environmental performance, year on year,” Mr Scherer said.
With the remaining projects earmarked for completion in 2024 and 2025, QAL continues to remain focused on operating in a safe, stable and sustainable way for generations to come.
Learn more about ways QAL is producing better outcomes for our environment and community by visiting our 5-YES website page.
