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Taronga Zoo is the largest zoo in Sydney and is arguably one of the most visited zoos in Australia. It has a variety of different animals across the world. It has an area of approximately 30 hectares and is located on the magnificent Sydney Harbour. Getting 1.5 million visitors a year, there are a lot of negative impacts on the Sydney Harbour environment. To try to prevent harming marine life in the harbor, Taronga Zoo tries different ways to be sustainable and not affect the surrounding environment in negative ways. Two of the strategies are the Waste Reduction and Purchasing Policy and water management and usage of recycled water.
Taronga Zoo takes care of over 5,000 animals from 350 species. This means a lot of waste is being generated. An estimated amount of waste is 50 tonnes a month. There is a steep slope (about 20 degrees) that leads animal excretion waste into the Sydney Harbour. This worsens the quality of water in the harbor and affects the life of the animals and plants in the harbor. Sydney Harbour once received polluted water and many species of animals were killed. Due to this, the zoo underwent some strategies and follows the law of WRAPP, which stands for Waste Reduction and Purchasing Policy. This meant that the zoo had to think about reducing waste when making purchases. They encourage state-owned agencies to increase purchasing materials with high recycled content.
To reduce the animal waste, Taronga Zoo found many uses for it. They make it into fertilizer and sell it to customers, use it as compost for plants within the zoo, and also use it to engage carnivore animals because of its smell. However, this only applies to the poop of herbivores. The carnivores’ poop is too toxic as the carnivore animals have a lot of bacteria in their digestive tracts. The carnivore poop is dumped in the landfill. Both wastes are treated to prevent harmful microorganisms under the Exhibition Animals Protection Act in a quarantined area in Camden.
According to the Taronga Zoo waste management website, the zoo is aiming towards a waste reduction goal of 90% diversion from landfills. Its current diversion rate is 84%. This means that the majority of its waste is either reused, recycled, recovered, composted, or converted into an alternative fuel source called PEF.
Since over 1.5 million people visit Taronga Zoo in a year, there is also waste made by humans. Many people do not dispose of their waste properly. The main reasons are that many people come from abroad and might not be literate when it comes to English, they might have a disability that doesn’t allow them to understand the instructions well enough and they might have their ways of disposing of waste in their cultures. To ensure that people dispose of their waste properly, Taronga Zoo tries to interpret the information in different languages like Mandarin, Hindi, Korean, etc., have visual instructions, label each bin, and color code the bins depending on what waste is to be dumped in there. The zoo is also partnered with Suez (a waste management company) that segregates and classifies the waste during collection. This ultimately led to their 84% diversion rate from landfills.
Over 3.5 million liters of salt water from the Sydney Harbour is pumped into the seal pools. In the past, the seal pools were filled with chlorine and animal waste and were pumped into the Sydney Harbour every fortnight without remediation (cleaning of water before being sent back into the harbor). This threatened the environment in the harbor, as the oysters that used to live in the base of the zoo started dying and the fairy penguins migrated elsewhere. The acidity of the water in the harbor increased, therefore making the water have very little oxygen and causing nutrients to build up on the surface of the water. This allowed introduced species and algae to grow on the water and not allow native species to thrive.
Taronga Zoo realized the negative impacts on the harbor’s environment and tried to prevent this by improving the filter system by adding more glass filters and improved their remediation by daily cleaning of the pool and using ozone to check the pH of the water in the pool twice a day, after a fortnight, the water is pumped back into the harbor and doesn’t use chlorine any more.
The usage of recycled water has dramatically increased in the past 26 years.
A water treatment plant was made in 1996 to treat and recycle fresh water as part of an original initiative called ‘Clean up Australia’. It was upgraded recently with a new stormwater tank, a new microfiltration unit, and process enhancements. The system is made to recover 100 million liters of water annually. The main uses of recycled water in the zoo include exhibit moat filling, hosing down of animal exhibits, toilets, and lawn and garden irrigation. This includes many benefits like less reliance on Sydney Water; especially during water restriction periods and reducing the dry weather discharge into the harbor. However, fresh water is still needed for the health of staff, customers, and animals.
The Taronga Zoo has thought of many ideas to be sustainable and prevent the ecosystem of Sydney Harbour from being harmed and destroyed due to the runoff and discharge. Two of their ideas were following the law of Waste Reduction and Purchasing Policy (WRAPP) increasing the usage of recycled water and improving remediation (the cleaning of water before sending it back into the harbor to prevent pollution). These ideas have reduced the negative impacts on the Sydney Harbour, while also providing the Zoo with benefits for the zoo such as less reliance on Sydney Water and improved wellbeing of animals, staff, and visitors, thus making Taronga Zoo a very sustainable tourist destination.
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