I have a suit. It is pretty stylish I think. Well, actually, I have two suits. The second I got at the Salvos and was paid for by an NGO when I was interstate on a holiday; but they contacted me to do some work for them. The first suit was from Vinnies and it was free, the NGO concerned at that time paid $80 to have it altered to fit.
The times I wear these suits are limited. I have worn them when I go to court, for weddings and, once, a funeral. Last year I wore my suit to the Gunns AGM. Tho’ I wore a white t-shirt under the jacket, quite by my fault.
At the AGM, I stood up and asked John Gay why there is no effluent testing of the proposed mill’s waste water. I pointed out that the testing done for the IIS was so wrong it was not even correct. That the effluent testing was so wrong it meant nothing. In fact, the DPIWE and TWS submissions to the RPDC said the same thing and were probably one of the reasons why the RPDC said that Gunns submission was ‘critically non-compliant’. There are various reasons why this was so.
Mr Gay referred my question to one of his executives on the panel. This executive was forced to admit that the pulp mill’s effluent testing had been rejected by the Feds and had to be repeated ‘as we speak’. The Gunns executive also admitted the Feds had also required the company to incorporate extra chemical analyses in the tests.
For a shareholder in Gunns this should have raised a question. The original tests were a joke, but they were extremely expensive. Should shareholders carry that cost?
Gunns portrays the mill as ‘world’s best practise’, but the executive who answered my question said that the ‘representative’ effluent samples would be tested within ’48 hours’. However, the world’s best practise standards (the USA EPA), say that samples must be tested within 36 hours, therefore, Gunns fails.
There are several other technical areas where Gunns is ‘critically non-compliant’, but there is one the Feds may have missed. Dioxin is one of the most toxic chemicals known. The pulp mill will put dioxins into the Bass Strait, where they will accumulate. When the the exec said that the Feds had asked for more chemical analysis, in one respect I thought ‘good’. However, a few years there was a very good study in the USA that looked at ‘Whole of Effluent Testing’ (WET).
They found that, as dioxin is hydrophobic, the standard chemical analysis underestimated the concentrations of dioxin by an order of magnitude. Are the extra chemical analyses the Feds have ordered are WET tests or the old, inaccurate, tests. We need to know … can someone with authority request details?
As things stand now, there is no information about how toxic the waste the pulp mill will dump into the Strait. It is very likely that the testing the Feds have requested is inadequate.
I am a small person, but I hope that someone can do an FOI on the effluent test protocols. Someone can raise this issue to the proper people, someone, or some group can pick this up and pursue it as Gunns are vulnerable on this issue, more than anything else, on the ocean pollution from the mill, and they know it.
Gunns will not tell Sodra, but the pollution the mill will dump into Bass Strait has no testing standards, is false and vastly underestimates the concentration of the very toxic and bioacumulative dioxins, one of the most poisonous and deadly chemicals known to humanity – up there with nuclear waste.
This is an appeal, I can’t run this. Is there an organisation who can? TAP? the Greens? TWS?
It is a critical issue, an issue of ‘critical non-compliance’, and it may be continuing under the Feds pro-industry eyes…
