Track Your Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Infrastructure Data
In an effort to understand their greenhouse gas emissions, Dunedin City Council (DCC) have been monitoring and reporting on their wastewater treatment plant emissions for some time, utilising the Water NZ guidelines to report in a consistent manner. To do this reporting, DCC were manually recording and collating the data into a spreadsheet on an annual basis, which was time-consuming and potentially prone to error.
To help alleviate the manual work required and reduce human error, Lutra led a project to leverage our compliance and operational software, Infrastructure Data (ID), to actively collate data, monitor and report greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at the Tahuna Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) in near real-time.
The project aimed to use ID to collect, analyse, and report GHG emissions at Tahuna WWTP following Water NZ's carbon accounting guidelines. A dashboard and batch report were set up to track emissions from three primary sources: biological treatment, effluent discharge, and sludge treatment.
The project was implemented by Lutra’s Dunedin-based process engineer Colby Putnam who verified Tahuna's treatment processes and integrated data from sensors, meters and manual field form into ID to automate the calculation of GHG emissions. Following the Water NZ Guidelines, a Level 2 approach was taken, using site-specific data to generate accurate emission estimates.
The project has resulted in DCC moving away from the laborious and potentially error-prone system of manual data entry into spreadsheets followed by annual report generation, to having a daily view of their GHG emissions. This allows them to track how their GHG changes throughout the year and how any modifications they make to the plant/operation etc., may affect the output.
The successful implementation of greenhouse gas emission tracking at Tahuna WWTP demonstrates both Infrastructure Data's effectiveness as well as its versatility. Lutra’s hands-on engineering support, combined with software expertise, provides a reliable solution for treatment plants to meet compliance standards and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Following the successful implementation at Tahuna, Lutra will now be rolling out similar reporting to the Green Island & Mosgiel wastewater treatment plants.
Projects like this position Lutra as a leader in providing solutions for the industry's sustainability efforts.
Want to automate your GHG reporting? Get in touch with Lutra to find out how.