Page 141 - Shaping A Sustainable Future

Fuel Usage Waste Generation

A Hyundai R220LC-9S excavator is deployed at the Services provided by the company include the rental of
nursery to mix decomposed plant matter with soil to decorative live-potted plants for events and ceremonies.
create a potting soil compost mixture (see Figure 8). The plants are trimmed and “repaired” upon return to
Island Landscape Nursery estimates that the excavator the nursery, followed by recuperation cycles before
is operated daily for up to 8 hours and requires a fuel redeployment. Potted plants that are damaged are
top-up of approximately 160 litres of diesel every 16 sorted and chipped into finer particles mixed with soil to
hours. This translates to roughly 1,600 litres of diesel form a composite substrate, as shown in Figure 9.
used monthly or 19,200 litres of diesel or 50,670 kg of
CO emission annually at a conversion rate of 2.6391 kg
2
of CO /litre of diesel (reference from https://comcar.
2
co.uk/)

Figure 8: Excavator for soil mixing.

Synthetic Chemical Usage

Island Landscape Nursery uses liquid fertilizer and
pesticides in their business operations, but the company
prefers not to reveal the type or brand. Tallied usage Figure 9: Plastic and organic waste generated.
information points to 500 – 600 kg of liquid chemical
fertilizer used monthly or 7,200 kg annually. In addition,
a liquid pesticide is used at an estimated rate of 15 kg
monthly or 180 kg annually. All this points to approximate
7 500 kg of synthetic chemicals being used annually, of
which a fraction of these chemicals will almost certainly
be lost to the environment.
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