Police searching for the body of a retired Queensland school teacher will have to sift through about 3,000 tonnes of rubbish by hand to find her remains.
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Jim Whitehead - a retired Queensland Police search and rescue coordinator - told Sky News Australia on Wednesday it will be a "very labour-intensive process".
"As the footage shows, it is a slow process. Every bit of rubbish has to be sifted through by hand, there is no real mechanical means to be able to do it," he told Peter Stefanovic.
However, he believed police would be helped by the fact that most major waste facilities in the country had detailed records of where trucks dumped the rubbish.
"So, if the police can identify the rough location of where the body was disposed then its possible to narrow down the section of the dump," Mr Whitehead added.
"Police and SES would rake through all the rubbish looking for identifiable pieces and then there would be specialist, scientific police officers that would look at those items."
"As you can imagine, some rubbish is compacted fairly decently, and everything joins into another so it all looks pretty the same," he said on First Edition.
"So, it is a very incredibly difficult task to do that. Searchers have to be very vigilant in identifying anything that may be relevant, even if it doesn’t appear to be initially
Mr Whitehead stressed the human body did not "fall apart all that easily" and expected a "decent portion of remains" to be eventually discovered.
"Whether you can distinguish them from the surrounding rubbish will be another problem that will pose the searchers," he stressed, adding if authorities were in the right spot, he was confident they would find "something".
