NSW Pollution Crisis Hidden

Monday, 03 October 2011 07:07

With the NSW Cabinet due to consider the independent report on the Orica pollution incident this week, Total Environment Centre is calling for urgent and comprehensive reform of the state’s pollution control system, after reviewing a range of compliance audits which revealed that incidents of environmental harm are going unreported across industry sectors.  Cumulative pollution loads on local people and the environment are also unknown.

“Environmental audits by the Office of Environment and Heritage of several sectors over the last 5 years have found a significant number of non-compliances with pollution licences; and in two industries repeated failure to fix the problems.  Obviously they would have also led to some environmental harm incidents but were never reported because the non-compliance was not known until the audit.  The pollution licensing and enforcement regime is dysfunctional,” said Jeff Angel, Executive Director of TEC.

Mr Angel said a brief TEC review of the Department's audits reveals they have not resulted in improved compliance over 5 years for instances of dust mis-management in coal mines and substandard management practices for chlorinated solvents. "The remedial measures instituted by the Department were ineffective".

“It appears that far from protecting the community's interests, the Department and its licences are seen as token pieces of paper, and bad practice often continues unchecked,” said Mr Angel.

“Given the large range of non-compliances that were found in the various reviews and clearly not reported to the department over a number of years – the estimate of incidents of environmental harm that would have occurred and were also not reported must be significant,” said Mr Angel.

“There is also the problem of cumulative impacts.  The department should know and tell the public about the cumulative local air and water catchment level pollution from these unreported incidents in addition to the reported breaches and the significant pollution legally allowed by the licences.  This should be basic information with each audit and grant or renewal of licence - but it's not.”