Case Study
Drone-based environmental surveillance, vegetation growth analysis, and 3D photogrammetry — providing EPA-aligned aftercare evidence for Moe and Morwell landfill sites every three months.
Client
Latrobe City Council
Sites in scope
Moe + Morwell landfills
Cadence
Quarterly (3-month cycles)
Compliance frame
EPA Victoria BPEM + Closed Landfill Guidelines
Latrobe City Council manages a portfolio of landfill assets across the Latrobe Valley. Two of those — Moe Landfill (closed and rehabilitating) and Morwell Landfill — require ongoing environmental surveillance under Victoria's Closed Landfill aftercare obligations.
Council needed a way to evidence cap vegetation health, identify defects (cracks, depressions, erosion gullies, vegetation dieback), and document findings with photographs and coordinates suitable for review by EPA-appointed auditors — without sending staff to walk transects across uneven, potentially hazardous landfill surfaces every quarter.
Avolution Tech was engaged to deliver this surveillance and reporting end-to-end on a quarterly cadence.
A fixed cadence of fly, analyse, model, and report — every three months.
High-resolution flights covering site perimeter, buffer zones, rehabilitated cell areas and capping. Overhead and perspective imagery captures the full site footprint each cycle.
Quarter-on-quarter analysis of rehabilitation progress across the cap surface. Tracks vegetation health, erosion control, and settlement indicators required under Closed Landfill aftercare obligations.
Photogrammetry-derived terrain models for cell airspace tracking, surface change detection, and capping condition assessment over time — enabling data-driven asset management of the closed site.
Custom-branded PDF reports with executive summary, methodology, captioned figures, observations, and recommendations — written for council environmental services staff and EPA-appointed auditors.
Closed landfills in Victoria carry aftercare obligations that can extend up to 30 years post-closure. Councils must demonstrate ongoing monitoring of cap integrity, vegetation establishment, and any change indicators that could signal underlying issues — and the evidence has to satisfy EPA-appointed auditors at audit cycles.
Drone-led surveillance is the lowest-cost, highest-coverage way to produce that evidence. A single flight captures more of the site, more consistently, than any walking inspection — and the imagery is timestamped, georeferenced, and directly comparable across quarters.
Avolution Tech's reports are written in the language council environmental services teams and their auditors expect, so the evidence is audit-ready the day it's delivered.