Greenpeace Australia Moves Dioxin Waste as Incineration Protest

SYDNEY, Australia, June 28, 2004 (ENS) - Greenpeace Australia spent Sunday moving 58 barrels of toxic dioxin waste to keep it from being incinerated. With support from local residents, Greenpeace moved the waste from the Meriton site at Homebush Bay to the neighboring former Union Carbide site where equally toxic waste will be treated with a safer, cleaner, closed loop technology.

"If we leave this waste here it will be incinerated by Meriton and dioxin will be released into the air," says Greenpeace toxics campaigner Jason Collins.

Anyone who attended the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympic Games will remember that Homebush Bay was the location for many of the Olympic venues, including Sydney Olympic Park, Olympic Stadium, Olympic Village, and the Sydney International Aquatic Centre.

Greenpeace demonstrators move the drums of dioxin contaminated waste. (Photo courtesy Greenpeace Australia)

The former Union Carbide site at Homebush is owned by the New South Wales state government. Union Carbide made the herbicide Agent Orange during the 1960s and '70s and dumped the waste from this process in Homebush Bay and on its foreshore, including on the Meriton site.

A proposal to incinerate the waste was approved by a Commission of Inquiry and has since been given the go ahead by the New South Wales Government. "What we have here is a race to build apartments at the expense of public health," said Collins.

Under the Stockholm Convention, an international treaty ratified by Australia in May, incineration of toxic waste is illegal.

"Dioxin is the most poisonous chemical known to science. It accumulates in our bodies, causes cancer and is passed on to our children," Collins said. "We are doing this to bring attention to Sydney's toxic waste crisis and to ask New South Wales Planning and Infrastructure Minister Craig Knowles to stop choosing incineration when safer technologies exist."

"Meriton has chosen a quick and dirty cheap incineration technology in order to get their apartments up first and Craig Knowles has approved this. It doesn't make sense when a cleaner closed loop technology exists and is being used on the neighboring site," said Collins.

In 2000, then New South Wales (NSW) Minister for Transport, Carl Scully assured Greenpeace that toxic waste at Homebush Bay would not be incinerated. As recently as last year NSW Premier Bob Carr said in a radio interview, "There's no way you'd dispose of hazardous waste in an incinerator."

But Knowles approved incinerating dioxin contaminated toxic waste at the Meriton site. Incineration is scheduled to begin in late 2004 or early 2005.

Knowles is considering a further three proposals to incinerate a different batch of toxic waste, including the world's largest stockpile of hexachlorobenzene (HCB) at Orica's site in Botany.

Aerial view of Botany Industrial Park (Photo courtesy Orica)

There is a legal requirement to treat the waste by a target date of 2006.

Orica says it has tested a safe technology called GeoMelt and wants to build a plant on the Botany site. GeoMelt is a process which mixes the HCB waste with soil and melts it in a sand lined steel crucible by immersing electrodes into the mixture. The waste is destroyed in the crucible by converting organochlorines to hydrogen chloride and carbon oxides.

The molten soil cools to glassy rock, free of organic matter, and can be crushed and recycled for use in construction work. The residual gases from the melt will be treated in a gas treatment system, undergoing several cleaning processes before being discharged to atmosphere through a carbon filter.

Orica says it has concluded that "the safest and most appropriate action" is to build an plant beside the waste storage facility and process the waste on-site. Orica will only treat wastes historically manufactured on the site.

A recommendation by an independent panel on Botany is due by Wednesday. Knowles will then decide between incineration or cleaner closed loop technology to treat the HCB stockpile. He is also deciding on a proposal to incinerate toxic waste in a cement kiln in Berrima.