EPA uses tracking devices, fines to curb waste haulers

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This was published 9 years ago

EPA uses tracking devices, fines to curb waste haulers

By Peter Hannam

Tracking devices, transport restrictions and hefty fines are to be the weapons of choice of the NSW government in its bid to stop contractors exporting hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste to Queensland each year.

From Saturday, it will be an offence to ship waste more than 150 kilometres by road from where it was generated.

Wasted opportunity: Landfills amount to a lost resource, recyclers say.

Wasted opportunity: Landfills amount to a lost resource, recyclers say.Credit: Robert Pearce

The clampdown aims to restrict "the potential for illegal and dangerous operations", while also deterring operators from dodging NSW's high landfill levies, said Environment Minister Rob Stokes.

"Illegal dumping and waste levy avoidance by unscrupulous operators is undercutting legitimate businesses, distorting the market, causing millions of dollars in clean-up costs to communities and putting our environment and health at risk," Mr Stokes said.

The introduction of a so-called "proximity principle" for waste management has been called for by green groups, such as the Total Environment Centre, for years. "It's extremely good," Jeff Angel, the centre's executive director, said of the new policy. "It's pretty close to industry best-practice."

Steve Beaman, director of waste and resource recovery at the NSW Environment Protection Authority, said an estimated 400,000 tonnes of NSW waste ends up in Queensland each year, a tally that has surged since the government of Campbell Newman scrapped the state's waste tax in 2012.

The cost gap was so wide that at one point last year, it was lucrative for some operators to excavate landfills in NSW, collect a rebate, and truck the waste to Queensland. Contaminated soil from Victoria continues to be trucked across NSW to Queensland to avoid high dumping fees.

"The community that generates the waste should have the capacity to manage that waste," Mr Beaman said.

Under the new rules, illegal waste transporting will attract fines of $15,000 for corporations and $7,500 for individuals for each offence.

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Additional enforcement regulations now before the Upper House would allow the EPA to install its own GPS tracking devices on trucks viewed to be "high risk", Mr Beaman said.

One spur for the long-haul shipping of waste has been NSW's relatively high landfill fees. Under a program that ends next year, landfill costs have risen at the annual pace of $10 plus the consumer inflation rate for eight years in a row. For the Sydney region, the levy is $120.90 per tonne of solid waste.

"We want landfills to be more expensive than alternative recycling treatment," Mr Beaman said.

Tony Khoury, executive director of the Waste Contractors and Recyclers Association of NSW, said the state was able to generate nine extra jobs for every 10,000 tonnes of recycled waste. He blamed the Newman government, which is considering a new waste disposal policy, for forcing NSW to take draconian steps.

"We wouldn't need to go to this extent if Queenslanders had more vision," Mr Khoury said. "It's been obvious to us that Queensland's not going to do anything - and they're not going to do anything in a hurry."

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