BY SIMON TAYLER
SYDNEY — Local residents in the heavily populated Auburn-Clyde-Granville area, in Sydney's western suburbs, are fighting to stop the Collex corporation from opening a waste "transfer station" in Clyde. The dump has the backing of the NSW Labor government.
Collex has a billion-dollar contract with the NSW government to transport Sydney's putrescible (or decomposable) domestic waste to Woodlawn, an enormous abandoned open-cut mine near Goulburn. Collex wants to build a plant at the former Clyde rail yards, near Duck River, where the waste will be compacted into freight containers and loaded onto trains.
The transfer station will replace Sydney's seven existing domestic waste stations, meaning that garbage trucks from all over Sydney will drive to Clyde to empty their loads.
According to John Drake, from Residents Against Garbaging the Environment at Clyde, this is only the start of the problem. In preparing a case for the NSW Land and Environment Court, Drake calculated that replacing the existing seven waste transfer stations with one huge station in Clyde will mean that Sydney's garbage trucks will be travelling an additional 100,000 kilometres a day.
Drake pointed out that the current government contract stipulates that Collex has to use the existing waste transfer stations in conjunction with railheads close to the waste stations. Now, the company wants to save money by having Sydney ratepayers foot the bill for transporting waste to Clyde on municipal garbage trucks.
"These trucks will be travelling through Sydney, polluting everyone along the way with viruses, bacteria, fungi, exhaust fumes, greenhouse gases, noise and vibration", Drake said. Rotting garbage releases toxic gases, such as methane, hydrogen sulphide and ammonia, which will drift — unfiltered — into the local atmosphere.
The Clyde area is already the site of six other waste facilities, as well as an oil refinery and several major roads.
Local residents have fought a long campaign to prevent the construction of the waste transfer station at Clyde. Two locals, Drake and Alan Brzoson, have taken the company to the NSW Land and Environment Court. They ran the longest running case in the Court's history without legal representation. Objections to the proposal have exceeded 1600 — the largest number ever recorded in a Class 1 matter in court.
The court's decision is due later this year.
Once the waste has been transported to Goulburn, it will be dumped in a huge abandoned open-cut mine. While the old mine will be lined, it is inevitable that toxic chemicals will leach into water tables. The area around the mine is part of the catchment area for Warragamba Dam, which supplies the bulk of Sydney's drinking water.
The NSW government claims the transport of Sydney's putrescible waste to Woodlawn is an "important step to towards sustainable waste management in NSW". But under the contract with Collex, none of the waste transported to Woodlawn will be recycled. In fact, the company has an interest in not recycling the waste, as it is paid on a per-tonne basis.
Collex is a subsidiary of the Vivendi corporation, a French multinational with a revenue of around A$50 billion in 2002. Vivendi is under investigation in both Paris and New York for overstating the value of its assets.
The company is notorious for its corporate practices. For example, Vivendi owns two subsidiaries in India which have contracts with the Chennai Municipal Corporation. The Vivendi company supplies water to the city of Chennai, much of which comes from the Pallikaranai wetlands. Meanwhile, the other subsidiary Onyx, dumps around 1000 tonnes of garbage every day on an adjacent site.
In a similar way, several Vivendi-owned companies, such as General Water Australia, Wyuna and Veolia, have contracts with Sydney Water to filter and supply water from dams that could be potentially affected by rubbish dumped by Collex near Goulburn.
In 1997, the Australian arm of Vivendi was part of a consortium that was implicated in Adelaide's "big pong". For three months, the smell of rotten eggs permeated the city. An academic from Queensland university, Ken Hartley, found that the "big pong" was caused by inadequate monitoring and equipment failures.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, September 24, 2003.
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