A proposal to build a $700 million waste to energy incinerator at Eastern Creek seems set for refusal. Until recently Eastern Creek was best known for its racing circuit but the demand for home sites has seen it become an attractive housing suburb and there is a strong NINBY reaction to siting the incinerator there.
Protesters do have a point. These plans locate the unit just 800 metres from homes, schools and sporting facilities and this industrial plant is expected to burn well over a million tonnes of industrial waste a year. It will use the latest technology, but there is the inevitability that it will discharge emissions that include small particulate matter, sulphur dioxide and heavy metals. The heat generated will be turned into sufficient electricity to serve thousands of homes.
The proposal generated 949 public submissions, only two of which voiced approval. It is now in the state political melting pot and the Greens have signalled their opposition. They are calling for a fifteen mile exclusion radius from all forms of housing for this and similar proposals.
That raises another interesting question. Where - in the ever expanding metropolis of Sydney - do you find a vacant piece of land surrounded by a fifteen mile exclusion from housing ? Basically, that excludes all forms of new heavy industry from the city and suggests it can only be located in deep western country New South Wales.
We would do well to remember what happened with the search for a storage site for the nuclear waste generated by our sole nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights. Despite searching this entire continent we have not been able to achieve agreement for a site just one mile by one mile square to build a storage facility that will remain inert for thousands of years.
As a result, the used fuel rods remain stored within the reactor site deep in the heart of Sydney and there is little prospect that this situation will change any time soon. We continue to generate waste and now China is refusing to accept our plastic waste exports and we face a new disposal problem. If we send this volume to landfills it will quickly overcome our capacity at existing sites, and we will face this same NIMBY problem in finding new ones.
A modern waste incinerator is the logical answer to this problem and to be economically viable it needs to be within reasonable trucking distance to where the waste is generated. What is now required is the political consensus to bite the bullet and make the decisions about where it will be located.
It is inescapable that the NINBY objections of some part of Sydney will have to be rejected for the common good !
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