Greetings to all. 

Please read and endorse the sign on letter being circulated by the National Toxics Network (NTN) of Australia. The letter is calling on the Australian Minister of the Environment to stop the export of 11,000 tonnes of extremely toxic POPs stockpile of hexachlorobenzene in Australia to Europe for incineration. Instead, the NTN is calling for this waste to remain in Australia and be treated by an appropriate non-incineration treatment technology.

The company responsible for the waste is contacting national and international NGOs to get support for exporting this to Europe for incineration. This is an important opportunity for GAIA members to counter this trend by strengthening the call for obsolete stockpiled waste like this to be treated with appropriate non-burn technologies. Such technologies are in the early stages of development, but they will not be able to develop if stockpiled wastes are always sent to Europe for incineration.

So keeping this waste in Australia not only prevents its incineration but will also encourage the development of safer, appropriate non-burn technologies to treat stockpiled wastes. Then, potentially, other stockpiled wastes - like the thousands of tonnes of obsolete pesticides all over Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe -- could potentially go to a facility like this instead of being sent to Europe for incineration. Until such a facility reaches the commercial stage, our calls for obsolete pesticides to be treated through appropriate non-burn technologies are ineffective, since no such facility exists.

(Please note, and see below in the background piece provided by NTN, that a new facility to treat this was will not be used for ongoing hazardous wastes. For process waste, the only real solution is prevention, or reducing the volume and toxicity of waste through clean production. It is NTN's intent only to use this new facility for existing stockpiles of waste for which prevention is, obviously, not an option.)

Thanks for your consideration. If you have any questions, please contact us or the National Toxics Network in Australia, whose contact information is at the end of this message.

Cheers,
Manny and Annie GAIA


BACKGROUND PROVIDED BY NATIONAL TOXICS NETWORK:

National Toxics Network (NTN) has been working on this particular stockpile since 1989, when colleagues forced the then ICI Australia (now Orica Australia) to close the solvent plant that produced this HCB byproduct stockpile.

In 1996, the National Advisory Body (NAB) on Scheduled Waste (made up of all Australian State and Commonwealth Governments, industry and NGOs including ourselves) released the national Management Plan for Hexachlorobenzene (HCB) to oversee the destruction of the world's largest HCB stockpile.
The HCB Management Plan stipulated that the waste should be destroyed as "close to the source as possible, " (para 6.3) due to the significant risk of transporting such a large stockpile of POPs waste and Australia's proven ability to destroy hazardous waste in an environmentally sound manner. ( Australia had an Ecologic Gas Phase Chemical Reduction -- GPCR, a non-burn technology -- facility destroying our PCB and DDT waste for nearly a decade.)

Importantly, the HCB plan stated that the destruction facility would deal with the HCB Stockpile and then be disbanded (para 6.12)

The facility was not to be established as an ongoing commercial venture for hazardous waste.

Australian legislation bans the import of POPs waste except in special circumstances such as the POPs stockpiles from the South Pacific where there is not the technology to deal with them.

Orica has now been ordered by a Commission of Inquiry to find another site for its chosen GeoMelt technology and is claiming that it can't.

What we have advised them is that to get community support they must reject incineration technologies and demonstrate waste minimisation activities, (see www.3C.org.au ) something they are unwilling to do. They now view export to an overseas incinerator as the easier option.

Just as important in the consideration of this issue is the ongoing problem of the 'carpark' waste on the site. There is currently 45,000 cubic metres of HCB/HCBD contaminated soil, sand etc that is now leaking into groundwater and air, which urgently needs cleanup and obviously this cannot be shipped overseas.

So in summary, Orica and its commercial needs/desire should not be allowed to it bully its way around the requirements of Australia's Hazardous Waste Act or the well-designed consensus driven HCB Management Plan. They have approached other NGOs in Australia with their proposal for export which has not been supported by any of these NGOs.

For more information visit www.oztoxics.org and follow the prompts to the HCB Community Information System

Thank you for your interest.

Dr Mariann Lloyd-Smith PhD (Law)
Coordinator
National Toxics Network Inc.
47 Eugenia St Rivett ACT 2611
Tel & Fax (612) 62885881
Mobile 0413 621557
Email: biomap@oztoxics.org
http://www.oztoxics.org/ntn