Rory’s Rambles: Rocking sustainability at Armstrong

DUE to deep excavation in solid ground at our Armstrong Creek community, there have been substantial amounts of rock removed from trenches and road construction and stockpiled on future stages.

In Victoria in general, there is a shortage of rock production as quarries struggle to keep up with the supply of rocks for roads and concrete production as we build the state’s infrastructure — new projects and roads, the Western Distributor, etc.

Rock often has to be trucked long distances, which isn’t a sustainable practice on our ever-increasingly congested roads.

A sustainable solution that Villawood Properties has undertaken on numerous occasions at its larger sites is to stockpile the rock and allow the contractor to bring in rock-crushing plant to crush rock on site and re-use it in trench backfill and road sub-base.

The cost of rock – and the amount of energy and fuel used to create it – makes this a far lower carbon footprint than traditional means of supply.

Villawood is always striving to investigate and implement any means of water and energy saving to assist our growing energy costs and reduce our carbon footprint and global warming.

On another local Villawood site, Wandana, where there was a shortage of land available for water retention and water treatment, Villawood has installed a revolutionary Biofilta system.

The works involve a large underground capture tank which slows all the peak developed run-off up to a one-in-100-year event down to pre-development as if it were just a grassy hillside.

The system will also treat the stormwater quality to best practice standards in a 50 square metre above-ground natural treatment system integrated into the landscape.

A smart bioplanter will also look after itself by using some of the captured run-off to recirculate to keep plants alive in between rain events and not reliant on potable water supplies.

As Biofilta’s Mark Noyce says: “It’s great to see council has endorsed innovative stormwater approaches that solve spatial challenges and provide a win-win for all parties.”