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environment

Noise

We’re dedicated to proactively reducing our noise contribution in Newcastle’s working Harbour, focusing on responsible management of our Carrington and Kooragang operations for minimal impact to our neighbours and communities.

Air quality Noise Water Footprint Climate Compliance
Port Waratah’s focus is to identify potential noise sources that may impact our neighbours and ensure effective controls are in place. We are committed to implementing innovative solutions to reduce our noise contributions.

Port Waratah’s Noise Management Strategy remains centred on maintaining well-performing equipment, minimising noise emissions as far as reasonably practicable, and validating performance through ongoing surveillance and compliance monitoring.

Noise management activities and programmes

We undertake a range of activities and programmes to ensure effective control of noise sources from our 24-hour operations and reduce the impact on our neighbours. The design of our plant and equipment, project planning, scheduling of work, the systems and procedures incorporates noise management controls for daily operations and long-term noise management strategies.

Low noise specification equipment

Where commercially available, we install low-noise conveyor drives, rollers and coal transfer chutes and use fully enclosed transfer points with minimal drop heights, soft flow chutes and regular plant and equipment maintenance to minimise operational noise. We also use best practice design principles for offsite noise reduction such as conveyor idler change outs, and re-orientation and adjustment of alarms.

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Low-Noise Conveyor Drive Strategy Complete

One of our dedicated noise-reduction projects, the Carrington Low-Noise Conveyor Drive Strategy was completed in 2022. The strategy focused on replacing conveyor drives with upgraded low-noise infrastructure for our stockyard conveyors, and boom conveyors on our stackers and reclaimers.

Over the five-year project, we invested more than $8.3 million to upgrade 28 conveyor drives. On average, the new drives have reduced their sound power by 9.7 decibels. The largest single reduction in sound power was 17.2 decibels. The project has reduced our operational noise impacts in neighbouring residential areas.

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Noise monitoring

We regularly undertake noise monitoring assessments at numerous residential and industrial locations to verify our noise performance. Our performance measures include our Development Consent conditions criteria and, where these are absent, adopting internal monitoring goals and programmes to analyse and evaluate noise over time. We also measure sound power levels of our equipment, which gives us real-world conditions information that can be folded into updated noise modelling of our terminals, allowing us to target specific items of plant and equipment generating noise, and proactive improvement projects. 

Our employees and contractors play a critical role in managing noise. We provide employees and contractors with ongoing noise management education and awareness to maintain effective controls, performance and processes, and encourage continuous improvement.