Sydney waste incinerator should be binned, department says

A planned major waste incinerator and energy plant for western Sydney – the largest in the southern hemisphere – is likely to be put on ice until after the New South Wales election next March after the Department of Planning recommended against the project.

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The director-general of the department is about to issue a negative assessment, saying that on the advice of Environmental Protection Authority, NSW Health and independent experts, the department had concluded it was inconsistent with the NSW EPA’s energy from waste policy statement (2015), and the air quality impacts and risk to human health were unknown.

There is still one more step in the process. Since March the actual consent for state-significant projects in NSW, particularly the contentious projects with more than 25 objections, rests with an Independent Planning Commission.

The panel of three experts would assess the project and hold further public hearings.

But the negative recommendation from the department, which is relatively rare for a project that has come so far through the planning process, means it will be facing a much higher risk of being rejected by the IPC.

The next step rests with developer, Ian Malouf. His company Dial A Dump, one of the biggest waste companies in NSW, has spent millions on the project and had planned to build it at his facility at Eastern Creek near the M7.

He has argued that this sort of waste-to-energy generation project is common throughout Europe and Scandinavia and is operated safely.

However he met stiff resistance from local residents and from the departments of health and the environment.

Despite reducing the scale of the project, by offering to build only stage 1 initially, the authorities were not convinced about the air quality risks in the Sydney basin.

The EPA has also raised concerns it would lead to an undermining of its recycling policies, as the incinerator would require large quantities of building and household waste to fuel it.

With the state election just nine months away, the issue of the incinerator could become the decider for several western Sydney seats.

Although the Berejiklian government has comfortable margins on paper in most of the western Sydney seats around the incinerator, the last election represented a high water mark for the Coalition.

The seats of Mulgoa (9.7%) where the incinerated is located, and surrounding seats of Penrith (6.2)%, (Prospect 3.4%) and Holsworthy (6.7%) as well as other truly marginal seats like East Hills and Granville could be vulnerable.

Last month the Jupiter windfarm near Tarago chose to withdraw its development application just a day before the IPC was due to hold public hearings. It too had been subject to a negative assessment.

But that doesn’t mean the project will necessarily be abandoned. It is open to a proponent to lodge a fresh development application down the track, either with changes or without.

The NSW Greens energy spokesman, Jeremy Buckingham, said the recommendation by the Department of Planning that the proposed western Sydney waste-to-energy incinerator be refused was a huge win for the residents of western Sydney and the lungs of all the people in Sydney.

He called on the government to back the Greens bill to ban such incinerators within 15km of residential areas to secure clean air into the future.

“This is a fantastic win for the residents of western Sydney and the Greens, who have been fighting this toxic proposal for years,” he said.

A spokesman for Dial A Dump said they were considering their options.