Orica revisits toxic waste row

CHEMICAL giant Orica has launched a fresh bid to start shipping its vast stockpile of highly toxic waste.

CHEMICAL giant Orica has launched a fresh bid to start shipping its vast stockpile of highly toxic waste from Botany in southeastern Sydney to France.

The application, lodged with the federal government yesterday, is the latest attempt in a two-­decades long saga to deal with what is regarded as Australia’s most difficult chemical waste issue.

An attempt failed in 2010 when the Danish government withdrew from an agreement to destroy the waste in the face of local concern and a campaign by environmental group Greenpeace.

Orica said it was confident the latest bid would avoid the problems of the Danish proposal, as it would not require any stockpiling at the disposal site in France.

However, Greenpeace Australia said it was opposed to countries exporting hazardous waste, prohibited under international conventions to which Australia was a signatory.

Greenpeace spokesman Adam Walters said Orica was attempting the same disposal method as was previously considered unacceptable. The organisation continued to have problems both with international shipping and combustion of the hazardous waste, Mr Walters said.

More than 15,000 tonnes of Hexachlorobenzene (HCB) is stockpiled at the Botany Industrial Park, a legacy of solvent manufacture between 1963 and 1991. The federal government has been asked to approve the export of 132 tonnes of HCB to a French facility operated by international company Tredi SA.

Orica said the application followed many years of consultation and engagement with the Botany community regarding the options for destruction of HCB.

The application said there was no viable alternative to the ­destruction method available in Australia, nor was there likely to be in the foreseeable future.

Orica executive, global head corporate affairs and social res­ponsibility, Gavin Jackman said the only alternative was continued long-term storage at Botany, which was unacceptable to the community.

“As Australia is signatory to both the Basel and Stockholm conventions, which deal with the international protocols for the handling of toxic waste, Orica has taken great care to ensure that the application complies with both conventions and has received ­detailed technical and legal opinion in support of this,” he said.

An independent review of the waste in 2006 found storage at Botany posed an unacceptable risk. It said disposal of the stockpile “would likely exceed the scale of any hazardous waste project every undertaken in Australia.’’

Orica expects the application to take about six months while the first shipment is expected later this year.

It is envisaged that, if ­approved and successfully destroyed, further applications would be made to progressively destroy the rest of the stockpile at the Tredi facility.

“Orica shares the overwhelming desire of the community to find a safe, permanent and environmentally sound solution to the HCB stockpile at Botany,’’ Mr Jackman said.

Orica said Tredi was a leader in the destruction of industrial waste, including HCB. Tredi’s high temperature incinerator operations had safely destroyed about 7500 tonnes of HCB-related waste from other countries.