Restaurant quality seafood and garbage have little in common, but the resourceful team at the old Woodlawn mine have used the energy from Sydney's rubbish to help produce tasty barramundi being snapped up by Canberra customers.
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Environmental waste management giant Veolia has been capturing methane gas from garbage at the former minerals mine at Tarago for a decade, but in the last year barramundi has been introduced into the large ponds heated by the methane-powered generators.
The result has been the best – and closest-sourced – barramundi in town, FishCo Fish Market owner John Fragopoulos said.
"They have a good dark and silvery colour - you can tell if a fish has been well looked after," he said.
"We buy what they can give us, and top up from other farms."
Those other farms were situated near Newcastle, Campbelltown and Adelaide, he said.
Veolia Woodlawn manager Justin Houghton said the mine accepted about 20 per cent of Sydney's garbage, shipped by rail, with energy from the collected methane feeding six electricity generators on site.
"We can apply suction to the waste mass, through pipes that are connected to these drains and wells in the waste, and that draws all the gas produced to be piped through to our power station," he said.
Heat is then transferred via pipes from the engines to the ponds.
Mr Houghton said the company's aquaculture ponds were in a building about 50 metres from the power station, with the source of the heat the only connection with the rubbish about two kilometres away in the mine.
Mr Fragopoulos said Veolia now supplied half of FishCo's increasingly in-demand barramundi stock, despite the first batch being ready only about six months ago.
"I see restaurants who say, 'any more of that particular bunch?'"
"We can't get enough."
It's a view supported by Dickson Chinese restaurant Jimmy's Place manager, Raymond Wong.
"Barramundi sales are up about 35 per cent in the last six months," he said.
"[It's] the silver and black colour, and a very good size too, and good textures."
Mr Houghton said while the 2.5 tonnes produced this year was not in itself commercially viable, the company had ambitions to expand.
"We've already got a team together to look at the feasibility of a full-scale project, ultimately bringing horticulture in so we can treat the waste water from the fish farm."
A Veolia spokeswoman said the Woodlawn premises had a NSW Food Authority permit.