Case Studies

Streamlining the management of illegal dumping incident reports

The Challenge

A hazard to communities and the environment

The dumping of illegal waste is a serious problem with negative consequences for people and the environment. Illegal waste can create fire hazards, harm the health of individuals, and damage the ecosystem. It contaminates the environment, poisons people, fauna, flora, and releases toxins into solid, groundwater and waterways. It is unsightly and unsafe.

NSW Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) engaged Lapis to assist in addressing the problem of illegal waste dumping by creating a powerful yet easy to use community reporting tool to enable the EPA to collect data on illegal dumping, analyse patterns and take action.

Being proactive, and taking action to address instances of illegal dumping sends a clear message of zero-tolerance to the community.

EPA NSW recognised a need for a reporting tool to empower the community, focus attention and provide education about illegal dumping and focus the resources of the EPA on specific instances of illegal dumping as well as providing aggregated data to identify and respond to patterns and areas of concern or “hot-spots” for preventative action.

Seeking to apply a “broken-window” approach to addressing the problem, NSW EPA briefed Lapis to develop a system that would:

Support the EPA to protect human and environmental health
Find, prioritise and clean-up dumped waste
Detect and penalise dumpers
Identify and proactively deal with waste dumping “hot-spots”
Engage with, educate and empower the community

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The Approach

A powerful back-end database

Lapis determined that taking a community based approach to data collection would have multi-layered benefits within the solution required by NSW EPA.

During the scope and solution development phases, the community based approach became central to; providing the body of data required by NSW EPA, enabling data aggregation and analysis, expanding the reach and effectiveness of the EPA by engaging the community as a key stakeholder and empowering the community to assist NSW EPA to take action.

In addition, this level of community engagement created a base of education and understanding within the community to drive behavioral and attitudinal change.

“Lapis developed a state-wide illegal dumping database and reporting portal, RIDonline that has provided a platform for our partners to capture real time illegal dumping data. This has helped gain valuable insights into illegal dumping trends across the state, and Lapis ongoing involvement in this project has enabled us to ensure that the system meets user needs.”

Renee Fairhurst, Senior Project Officer, Education and Programs, NSW Environment Protection Authority

Lapis successfully synthesised the system based requirements with the development of an easy to use web-based mobile app for use by the community with a powerful back-end data-base and reporting tools for use by NSW EPA that enabled effective incident and case management as well as fact based decision making.

Ridonline is fully cloud based, hosted and managed service developed by Lapis
Ridonline has two components: Ridonline Public and Ridonline Private
Ridonline Public is a fully offline capable and responsive web app that allows the NSW citizens to report illegal dumping to NSW EPA

Ridonline has a comprehensive ‘management portal that allows the EPA and related authorities to manage the reported issues with full case management and workflow capabilities. The management mode also has a comprehensive reporting and admin features.

Ability for the administrator to change the tables by adding, deleting and changing data fields
An export and upload features. Ability to export and import data easily
Creating records easily with unique identifiers

The Results

A comprehensive system

Through the development of the app and supporting system infrastructure, the solution delivered by Lapis successfully expanded the agency and effectiveness of the EPA while educating and empowering the community to take action.

Through the development and delivery of the “community” and “management” elements of the solution Lapis were able to support NSW EPA to achieve its objectives for the project and deliver tangible benefits including:

Protecting human and environment health
Detecting and penalising dumpers
Finding and clearing dumped waste
Identify dumping hot spots for preventative action
Providing aggregated data to support future resourcing, strategies and action plans
Delivering an easy to use web-based mobile app
A comprehensive incident and case management backend system tailored for the needs of NSW EPA

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