#13 The Train Wreck

We are thrilled to host Andrew Doig from the Australian Sustainable Business Group, who brings a wealth of knowledge on waste services and legislative review. Andrew guides us through the labyrinth of waste management and landfill approval, focusing on the pressing issues in New South Wales. From the Lucas Heights extension to the Woodlawn mine approval, we dissect the challenges of expanding waste facilities amid the pervasive NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) mentality. Learn the crucial differences between putrescible and non-putrescible waste and grasp why Sydney's landfill capacity is on a ticking clock set to expire by 2028.

Andrew also sheds light on the future of waste management in New South Wales. We explore viable solutions such as regional landfills and rail transport, stressing the urgent need for innovative strategies and government intervention. Wrapping up, we briefly touch on the promising frontier of energy-to-waste technologies, hinting at more riveting discussions to come. Don't miss out on this episode packed with expert insights and potential solutions for a sustainable future.

This episode was recorded on 17 May 2024

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The necessary disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this Podcast are the speakers’ own. They do not necessarily represent the views, thoughts, and opinions of 4Pillars Environmental Consulting Pty Ltd or any Client, Supplier or other party related to 4Pillars or the speakers. 

(c) Gunnar Haid and James Hammond

Transcript

Speaker 2 0:00

So have you started introducing yourself as Hammond, james Hammond, yet I tried it one time with my wife and she laughed me out of the room.

Speaker 1 0:10

You see what can I say with your wife. That's not when you're supposed to use it.

Speaker 2 0:15

I'm not meeting any other women at the moment. Could I?

Speaker 1 0:19

Hey, even, men, who knows, Maybe yeah maybe Bit of a power move. You know, you walk into a room with the EPA and they're okay. Gentlemen, my name is Hammond James Hammond, do you think that would go down? Well?

Speaker 2 0:32

Well, that's it I'm gonna. With all the feedback that we've been getting, I think both of our reputations are gonna precede us.

Speaker 1 0:38

We're making a name for ourselves in the industry like whether that's a good name or a bad name, who knows, but it's a name nonetheless, it is. We're getting feedback, which is good. I, I love it. Otherwise, you think we're spending so much time on these podcasts and we orally enjoy it, but it's all. It feels like you're talking into a void um. And then you see some download stats, which we are very, very pleased with, but it's like, okay, would someone say something out there please?

Speaker 2 1:05

I know. I mean we'll try and encourage a bit more interaction through, at least through like linkedin and and stuff like that hey, I'm gonna catch you off guard again.

Speaker 1 1:13

I have a totally different question for you yeah, say someone comes along. A famous hollywood director comes along. A famous Hollywood director comes along and says man, I've been following you on LinkedIn. Your life is spectacular. I think I should turn this into a movie. Guilty as charged. Yeah, you can pick the actor that plays you. Which actor would you pick?

Speaker 2 1:43

Well, I know what I want to say, but I think what I should say is I mean, I've always been told that I look like Richard Gere like a young Richard Gere, I might add. Ah yeah, so maybe young Richard Gere might be a good option.

Speaker 1 1:58

Actually I was because, hey, I had time to prepare for this question. I actually thought and this is such a cliche, but I thought a Tom Cruise wouldn't be a bad one for you.

Speaker 3 2:09

A younger Tom.

Speaker 1 2:10

Cruise. Yep For looks-wise Sorry about to say height-wise yeah.

Speaker 2 2:18

Yeah, I get that. If I could choose, I think I always thought Jake Gyllenhaal was quite a good actor and a handsome man, and so, yeah, I think Jake Gyllenhaal would be a good pick as well.

Speaker 1 2:30

I don't know him.

Speaker 2 2:32

You'll know him if you see him, I'm sure. Okay, so, gunnar, you've got to do the same. You tell me who would play you in the story of your life.

Speaker 1 2:40

Whoopi Goldberg.

Speaker 2 2:46

Just Whoopi.

Speaker 1 2:47

Goldberg, just mix it up, totally Okay, aside from the you know, everybody says you know the Brad Pitt, but Arnold Schwarzenegger would be.

Speaker 2 2:58

Similar physique.

Speaker 1 2:59

No, similar physique, exactly exactly, at least similar physique and accent. Maybe Matt Damon is someone I thought of I would pick. I love matt damon.

Speaker 2 3:09

And then there is there is a few, a few others, for example john krasinski oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's great steve carell, of course, I think steve carell steve carell would be a good pick, actually, yeah yeah, I, I think, so I like him more and more as he gets older. Like I like. I like what he does now better, I think, than some of his older stuff yeah.

Speaker 1 3:31

Yeah, I mean I would say after the. I mean you can't really identify with when he's in the office, but you're the later with the later.

Speaker 2 3:38

Yeah you know what I'm thinking gonna. I don't, because I'm thinking of actors that look like you, at you at your age. Now I don't think I've ever seen a photo of young Gunnar. Maybe for our audience you should put up a photo of Gunnar at 21.

Speaker 1 3:54

I can do that, that's no problem.

Speaker 2 3:56

I could do the same and then maybe I don't know, maybe I'll have to have a look at that and see if that sparks any other actors who you know who look like you well, I'm not necessarily because they look like me, but you know, when you have a question like that, it's always, um, what kind of characters have they played that you kind of identify?

Speaker 1 4:14

yeah, right, and who doesn't? Which male doesn't identify with jason boy?

Speaker 2 4:21

international man of mystery that you are going on.

Speaker 1 4:25

That would be more the Mr Hammond, james Hammond, right. So what do you think? Is it time to introduce our next guest, andrew Doig? Yeah, yeah, he's from the Australian Sustainable Business Group. Let me give a little bit of a background for him. He has a background in waste service from 1980 to 1992. He was then seven years with the Australian Industry Group and his main task there was listen to this the review of the POEO Act, so no wonder he knows so much about that subject. He was also on the board of waste service and in 2000 he founded the australian sustainable business group. So that's 24 years ago and he's doing a fantastic job over there.

Speaker 1 5:17

So I we came across him. I paid for one of their online seminars and my my credit card had expired, so in the ensuing email exchange we started chatting and in one of them he said hey, by the way, I love your podcast and that's always an easy way of pleasing us. Yeah, so anyway, I managed to pay, I listened to the seminar and we decided that. And who needs to be a guest on our podcast? One of the biggest discussion points that we have is that Sydney is very quickly running out of landfill space, while we are happily filling it up at record numbers, but there is a very limited amount of space and Andrew, more than anybody else, has really good insight into that subject.

Speaker 2 6:04

Yeah, for sure, absolutely. And yeah, it definitely has some good insights onto waste strategy and I guess you know where we're headed in terms of landfill space and that sort of thing.

Speaker 1 6:12

So there's a reason why this one is called the train wreck, so everybody listen in.

Speaker 2 6:17

Andrew, how are you Nice? Yeah, very good. Long time no speak.

Speaker 3 6:22

It has been. But yeah, in fact I found that Gunnar lives right next to a good friend of mine. Ah, there you go, small world.

Speaker 1 6:30

Do you guys know each other?

Speaker 3 6:32

I think James probably came to a few of my functions way back and yeah, well, I mean I've been running ASBG since 2000. So yeah, and have been running lots of mainly contaminated land seminars. I suppose it would be more in James' line of work, but you know, I tend to help the environment manager in an entity and provide services in that scope.

Speaker 2 7:00

I think we met when I was pretty much fresh out of uni, when I was working for Brickworks Andrew, oh, that's right. Yeah, and it was along those lines. It was because I was their environmental manager in New South Wales and I did some training to enhance PhD, which was awesome, actually it was, yeah, it was really great. And I still, like some of our staff now are still members and we we jump on your waist training seminars, especially which, which are great. Um, so yeah, we kind of go a little way back, but sort of patchy, I think oh, okay, well, you okay I thoroughly enjoyed your two hour one on the pou act.

Speaker 1 7:38

I watched it not live, but the recording. I really liked that and of all the speakers, I liked you the most because you were the only one who dared to be ever so slightly critical about it. Well, the Maddox lawyer was also slightly critical in the presence of the EPA. But yeah, it's a seminar. People can buy it online. Is that right? Yeah, it's a seminar. People can buy it online, is that right? Yes, yeah, it's still available. Yeah, I put that link in the show notes because I really enjoyed that and I think everybody in our industry should listen to that. I liked it.

Speaker 3 8:14

Yeah, I think. Well, we'll see. I think COVID certainly damaged the seminar set a bit.

Speaker 2 8:21

Well, look, we were really keen to chat to you today. I suppose you know you've got a lot of experience across, like you said, many different areas. We were keen to talk to you about the. We've called this episode the train wreck. That's what we're thinking. We're going to call it the train wreck, yeah well. So we would like to drill down a little bit, I guess, into the waste-related aspects around the waste levy and preparedness in New South Wales, for I guess what we need in the future and I suppose this is just off the back of the COPS waste conference as well, which is probably good timing. I didn't manage to get to that, so it's probably timely. I know that this is discussed a lot. We don't really do structure at BTS, so we just kind of roll with it a little bit. So I mean, where would you like to start?

Speaker 3 9:05

I think the topic the coming train wreck in the Sydney area on waste management can be traced back to 2021, when the New South Wales Government's own report came out saying that by 2028, we'll run out of non-protressible landfills in Greater Sydney area.

Speaker 2 9:24

Yeah right.

Speaker 3 9:25

There's a need for at least 3 million tonnes per annum extra landfill capacities post 2030. In addition to that, another half million tonnes of waste processed by energy from waste facilities. They probably underestimated the amount of waste. I can quote Frank Costomo. He did a few really good articles in Fifth State and he reckons they're out.

Speaker 3 9:49

I mean, sydney generates what 19.4 million tonnes in 2020 of waste and about 35% of that, or about 6.8 million tonnes, goes to landfill and probably about 80% of that is the greater city area, which I think yeah, it doesn't quite include Newcastle but includes a lot of Wollongong area. They reckon that, yeah, we'll be running out of non-protressible waste very quickly, but it takes 10 years at least to site a new landfill Now. I mean that's taking something like up to 10 million tonnes per annum by 2040. The problem is that we just have nothing in the pipeline. I was on the board of the waste service in the late 90s, early 2000, where we got through an extension to Lucas Heights to increase its capacity, virtually doubling it, and that was done because we ended up holding like 50 meetings with community groups trying to deal with the NIMBY, because waste is always NIMBY. It's been there for decades.

Speaker 1 10:49

Can I interrupt please? I hear NIMBY.

Speaker 3 10:53

I have no idea what this is, oh, sorry, not in my backyard. Oh Is the term that's used, where people just say no because I don't like what you're doing. It doesn't matter how good it is for everyone, it's me, me, me and you're damaging my local backyard, so go away. Okay, I get it. 50 meetings, mainly with sporting group, because they're giving $1.50 per tonne to the sporting groups to set up sporting infrastructure and it took 50 meetings to agree on how they all should be divided between them. And when it came to a vote at local government stage, the NIMBYs were outshouted. That actually worked and that's an interesting model to use. And now Australia is finding it very difficult to build the infrastructure just for renewable energy. They're getting knocked back on transmission lines, solar farms, wind farms and you know, the NIMBY thing has just got growing bigger and bigger and state governments seem to be more and more sensitive about any naysayers Getting back.

Speaker 3 11:59

So Woodlawn was when I was on the board of the waste service. We actually looked at Woodlawn mine because it was original mine and knocked it back and went for some other place in Cessna. The Cessna council was in favour of it. They were getting $1 a tonne or $1.50 a tonne kickback from the whole thing until, of course, then their rich residents go against it, particularly the wine owners. Then the, the whole parties come in, then you have your I don't know, I suppose objection crowd that comes in and suddenly the council just changes tune like that bang, no, we don't want it.

Speaker 3 12:36

Violia then decided I will take on Woodlawn, and they must have spent, from my reading, $70 million, something like that, in trying to get all the approvals through. They actually had to do it jointly with the transfer station and Cholora, and it took them 10 years to actually get approval, which I think they opened early 2000. Now that was a big hole in the ground. I think it had a 40 million ton capacity and it will run out in 2036, which is also a problem because there's still nothing in the pipeline to replace that.

Speaker 1 13:11

Can we go back a little bit and clarify a few terms here? When you're talking waste and let's aim at people who are not waste specialists anything from the red bin to contaminated mulch, for example, is considered waste and there is different classes for that. You mentioned the non-putrescible waste, which is what that is. What kind of waste?

Speaker 3 13:40

Yes, certainly, that's simple. The way landfills were designed back in the 70s was that kitchen waste which had very quickly rotting food, meat and vegetables and fruit was called protrusible waste, and because of that they generated a more contaminated leachate. And then you had the other waste, which was everything else that could go to landfill that wasn't hazardous and that was called non-protressible waste, which was mainly building, construction, paper wastes, vegetation waste from trees, but not material that will rot quickly, so protressible means it rots quickly. That will rot quickly, so protressible means it rots quickly and non-protressible means it doesn't.

Speaker 1 14:23

Okay, good. So and you're saying, and I read the New South Wales waste and sustainable material strategy that you mentioned here, which is already a kind of an interesting document, because the first thing that you see is the minister's picture in there, which for me already takes a lot of credibility out of it. What is I mean? What is this? Is this a, an election pamphlet, or yeah, whatever it is, I don't know right. So then you read it and it's all full of mothers running in flowery fields with their children in the and and yeah, I'm like, all right, fair enough marketing bs.

Speaker 3 14:58

I call it.

Speaker 1 14:59

Yeah, but in there it says, as you mentioned. It says well, sydney is going to run out of the non-putrescible waste by 2028. That was a document that was released in 2021. Yes, now it's 2024 and we're running out of landfill space by 2028. That suddenly is kind of close.

Speaker 3 15:21

It's worse than close. They should have started this back in 2018. There should have been planning proposals for waste facility.

Speaker 1 15:29

In that document right after, when you scroll through all the peaks and the minister's acknowledgements and whatever, I see that they have actually set some goals. There's no ooh and this is going to happen if we don't meet it. That's always the biggest problem. But they set some goals. How are they going with these goals?

Speaker 3 15:50

Good question. There is some thought out there that, oh, we can recycle everything. The issue with that is, yes, you can, but it will cost you an infinite amount of energy and you'll probably harm the environment more. So there's the first rule of recycling If you're going to harm the environment more by recycling, then it's better to send the material to landfill. For example, recycling a very cheesed up pizza box, the amount of extra energy, chemicals and wastewater convert that pizza box, remove the fat and make that paper into a recycled product will actually harm the environment more. So that's that's rule one. Rule two you've got certain wastes that must go to landfill because they're legally required, like asbestos waste, which you guys covered in that wonderful podcast on the mulch issue. Thank you, I. I love that. That was really good. I want to talk more about asbestos.

Speaker 1 16:50

We don't have enough time you're sick of that already, of talking about it not from the asbestos, don't get me wrong here, but and then then you have the residues that come out of recycling facilities.

Speaker 3 17:01

They have to go to landfill. There's no other place for them to go. I think in the report they call them residual waste. Then you have material dug up from contaminated land and that material you can try and get a resource recovery order exemption, a specific one. Good luck with that. So dig and put it into landfill is usually the most economically sensible way, even though we're paying very high landfill fees.

Speaker 3 17:28

Woodlawn was the last one to get approval. There was another one that was tried at Latham, which is kind of northwest of Wagga, an old tin mine, and the tin mine company was actually behind it. But it got knocked back by NIMBY completely. I mean, it was all going to be rail hauled and they ticked every box they possibly could, but again you were becoming a state significant development. It's the only way to get a landfill in. That's probably not really local and above 12,000 tonnes a year. Then the minister can pull the plug and I think that's what happened, or the council just recommended that to occur. So that was the last time and that was not back early 2016. And that was the last time any commercial attempt to site a new landfill occurred in New South Wales and there's been nothing else because it's virtually considered to be a loss-making exercise and no one in their right commercial mind would do it.

Speaker 2 18:28

I agree with everything you're saying, andrew, and if I could just offer some other perspective on that as well, it is very much left to the private sector to take on the risk, and there are some very simple things that could be done at a high level, like, for example, designating new large landfills as critical state significant infrastructure, where the minister could decide to put that designation on it, which would then kind of give more certainty, I guess, as to at least the outcome of the planning process. But yeah, we're definitely not seeing that. We do a lot of planning work, I do a lot of planning work and yeah, the NIMBYismism is alive and well.

Speaker 2 19:00

I'm still seeing issues around even basic things like urban encroachment, where I won't say where, but there's a waste facility that we work with, where they used to have a nice buffer of about I don't know a kilometer between them and the nearest residential property. All of a sudden, over the last few years, there's been housing development after housing development that has gotten closer and closer and closer to them, and then all of a sudden they've got the EPA knocking on their door saying, hey, we've got a load of issues here, we've got this issue here, we've got this new issue and we're all sitting around shaking our heads like, well, you know it needs to be managed. But also, have you noticed how we've got less and less space to operate over time? And it's just, it's such a basic planning principle that it's just not being upheld. So there's a few it's like the perfect storm of things kind of coming together. I don't see how we get to that, to where we need to be by 2028 either.

Speaker 3 19:58

Well, victoria's done a few interesting things. For a start, they have a noxious industry zone and they have at least a half a kilometre distance between things like landfills or any kind of waste management. Yeah, right, and that's been in for years. And of course, the anti-development lobby, whatever you want to call them, the NIMBY lobby, trying to tip that away all the time. Right, I have a great example. Many years ago, like Gosford, council's sewerage treatment plant got into trouble with odour emissions from the uncounciled. But of course the guys there at the sewerage treatment plant said well, it was the council themselves that allowed the residents to locate within 100 metres of the plant. What do you expect? Yes, shooting themselves in the foot, yeah, but again, probably property developers on the council.

Speaker 2 20:37

The cash for council, the money they get, it's just too tempting for them.

Speaker 3 20:42

Well, here's the issue. 2028 arrives. Sydney's non-protectible landfills run out Kemp's Creek, penrith Waste, all closed and there's nothing else. There's a potential for the central coast, the local government, to expand its landfill and they could put up the charges and make a nice fortune out of it, and so could a large number of local regional councils around. But these landfills aren't private. They're going to probably say no, we're only going to accept local waste, because once it comes in, even if they have a higher gate fee, it's going to be a flood. The closest one is South East Queensland Unreal.

Speaker 3 21:18

So going back five, six years ago, that's when Queensland put in its waste levy. Why? Because it was receiving 1.4 million tonnes from New South Wales into its own landfills and decided it didn't want to do that. There was an arbitrage. In other words, there was a difference of zero to $130 a tonne in the levies. So they whacked it up to $85. It's roughly about $60, $70, $80 a tonne is where the cost of transport becomes too heavy to actually take it up there. So it has to be at least that type of advantage. But when we're running out of landfills and have nowhere to go, I see that pipeline opening up again.

Speaker 2 21:59

In terms of what the options are. I mean, I think it's safe to say that landfills within the Sydney area or even just beyond is probably not realistic. The planning provisions can't change quick enough. I don't think that sort of leaves us, I guess, with regional landfills, and I suppose the transport option would have to be rail, like it would have to be electrified transport, right, Because the carbon cost in the future is just going to be too high. So where do you think that leaves us, Andrew? What are our options in New South Wales? Are we talking coal mines in Western New South Wales and then transporting by new rail lines?

Speaker 3 22:30

There are so many mining holes around Sydney it's not funny. There's hundreds, yeah, and you're talking massive volumes that could go in there. Of course, the issue all comes down to nimby. That's going to be almost impossible, considering that, you know, we're seeing massive protests about wind farms off the coast of new south wales. We're not china, we can't just mandate it somewhere. But there's going to have to be a much better government approach to dealing with NIMBY. I mean the federal government's even using the phrase YIMBY yes, in my backyard I do encourage that.

Speaker 1 23:08

So what's the solution? We have two waste experts here and one guy listening. That would be me. What should we?

Speaker 3 23:15

do. Well, I put this to the minister. We had a meeting in June last year and Tony Chappell, the CEO of the EBA, said that there is a waste strategy infrastructure paper coming out. We're still waiting. I've heard there's another consultancy doing a waste capacity assessment around the Sydney area to try and redo what the 2021 strategy did. We'll see how that progresses. Again, it's a typical government response oh, we have to do another report on this. What will happen? 2028 arrives and it's going to be a train wreck.

Speaker 3 23:53

Now this kind of reminds me of what happened in Naples around 2008, 2009. Naples' local landfill filled up, but everyone knew it was run by the mafia. All sorts of things were going into the landfill that shouldn't. Locals just had an absolute gut full of the whole thing and rejected any expansion of the landfill, rejected any other appraisal, so everything got tarred with this extreme you know not my backyard brush and Naples then had garbage on its streets for six months before Bernasconi, under pressure from the EU saying this is a health issue, reopened the old landfill and then for a couple of years so they could build a waste to energy plant for Naples, which they did, but it only took in half the waste. The rest of it. They ended up training to Switzerland and France and still do. But you can go onto Google. You can go Google or even YouTube. Youtube just look up Naples waste crisis and it's got these streets. And you go down these country roads around Mount Vesuvius and they're like two or three meters high on each side, going back four meters for kilometers.

Speaker 2 25:06

Unreal.

Speaker 3 25:07

Many of these were lit and went on fire, and now the EU has taken Naples local government to court for breaching human health rights.

Speaker 2 25:17

And, yeah, what a human health disaster, what an environmental disaster to have just uncontrolled waste disposal across such a huge area. I think a lot of the time when we're looking at these kinds of issues we don't consider what the alternatives are properly, and the alternative that you just set out there is something that could realistically happen and it would be just so much worse than any new landfill could be, especially with you know what we know about how landfill cells should be designed. Now I think it all comes back to leadership, like we really do need leadership at the highest levels in New South Wales to make it really clear that it is a critical infrastructure issue.

Speaker 3 25:53

Well worse than that. I think they're going to wait until it is a crisis, because then it will hit the media and they go oh, what are we going to do? Yeah, and then they'll be able to implement some sort of emergency controls, which, by the way, has already been enacted. I mean, woodlaw, when the rains hit, the railway line was cut and they're going where's this waste going to go?

Speaker 2 26:14

I like to see um on the department of planning's home page, maybe a big red bar with the with the end point, and we can see it every day, slowly, slowly, filling up a lot of the time. We need to visualize things a little bit, or help people visualize, because that's where we're at, isn't it? Things are just slowly, just trickling in filling it up and we're going to reach that point soon.

Speaker 1 26:34

Yeah, do you remember during the drought, when everybody got obsessed with Ragamba Dam and the graft that we had, and then suddenly we ended up very quickly with a $400 million desalination plant, which, by the way, hasn't produced any water yet? But look, I'm not kidding, but that's not what it was supposed to do. It's in reserve. Here is something that I know worked extremely well in Switzerland. When you take your garbage out from any household, it has to be in a specified yellow bag, and these yellow bags you can purchase at the supermarket and a bag costs around 10 bucks, and if your garbage is not in one of those bags, it doesn't get collected. And it's Switzerland, not Italy, where people do care whether their garbage gets collected or not. So that simple I would almost call it a trick immediately reduced the household waste drastically, by volume at least.

Speaker 1 27:41

Think about it, because I take my garbage out to the red bin and you don't even think about it. It's council rates. You whinge about it every quarter, but the garbage just goes. If you have to pay 10 bucks for every bag you take out, you suddenly start thinking about it. What am I gonna do with this? I don't know. Styrofoam that I just bought, that came with my tv. Yeah, yeah, look half a cubic meter of styrofoam, you know the swiss come up with incredible pragmatic ideas.

Speaker 3 28:11

I have to say that yeah, it's good, but that.

Speaker 1 28:14

But that would be predressable waste at least, because that one we're going to run out in gosh. I have the paper in front of me a few years later. Should we do things like that? I mean, I have another one, I have another really good one for the non-predressable waste. Can we please address the asbestos waste issue yet again, because we're filling up our landfill with stuff that doesn't need to go there.

Speaker 2 28:36

Yeah.

Speaker 1 28:37

In massive amounts, massive amounts.

Speaker 3 28:40

Absolutely, and I did a massive submission to the chief scientist engineer to look at alternative ways to landfilling asbestos material. They were kind of suggesting that, in terms of reference, having methods to allow resource recovery orders and exemptions on certain types of asbestos material. They were kind of suggesting that, in terms of reference, having methods to allow resource recovery orders and exemptions on certain types of asbestos material and, as I said, if you can bury it into an infrastructure project under road easements, under dam constructions, railway, as long as it's buried and signed off by a contaminated land auditor and appropriately monitor it, what's the problem?

Speaker 1 29:16

Yeah, I mean that wouldn't, because you know we're talking about saving. You know crushing up your milk bottles before you put them into the, you know and to reduce your volume. And I do that in the morning and in the afternoon I go out and supervise a remediation where we chuck 50 truckloads of so-called asbestos waste into trucks and we ship them out to the landfill. And I'm thinking, you know what, Suddenly, the urgency of me not producing so much waste in my kitchen has a different kind of urgency to it.

Speaker 3 29:48

Well, absolutely. I mean, I can shoot your leg off about asbestos as well. One of the big issues that they're going to have to deal with is the carbonation process, because you can carbonate asbestos it's white asbestos, magnesium silicate. You can turn it into magnesium carbonate and this is the major method that are used in global weathering to reduce CO2. But the problem is we have a mountain range from Orange to Canberra. That's a large amount of serpentine in there. But the trouble with serpentine you know you can. It comes in various physical forms and one of those forms is called white asbestos. If they allow and reduce these rules, I see a potential process like where you drive your soil into a processing facility and, under high pressure and a certain treatment, then they can actually treat the asbestos soil to be asbestos-free. But you can't guarantee that when you have a presence-based level of asbestos.

Speaker 1 30:48

But most of the time we don't even need to do that. The amount of bonded asbestos in soils that we come across is so minute it's irrelevant. It's it's completely and utterly. It's nonsense. We've beaten that that horse to death several times already like that. We don't need to separate the asbestos out.

Speaker 3 31:07

Give me a break yep, well, I mean um, there's no. Well, the current rule is you can't reuse anything that has any amount of asbestos in it. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 31:16

So you know, yeah, again, you see, you just get caught. But there's also, I mean there's major research going on on pilot plant scale carbonation of serpentine, but I mean they can't make that into anything that's asbestos free, because some serpentine will be asbestos, so I think it kills that in new south wales, even though they've got a major pilot plant in newcastle yeah, okay, but we, let's face it we don't have to have science come up with solutions to a bullshit law.

Speaker 1 31:47

Yeah, right, we have to have the bullshit law come to meet science. Let's face it. I agree, right, it's just the wrong way of going about it totally, totally agree.

Speaker 2 31:56

It would have been nice if they slipped that change into the um, that recent bill, as well, wouldn't it? They slipped a whole bunch of other changes in there that would have been good to just change the definition of asbestos waste. I think there's been there've been so many good things that we've touched on here, and I'm thinking that I think we've talked a lot about landfills, andrew, but obviously there are other pieces to the puzzle as well, and obviously waste reduction is definitely a part of them, and we need to continue to go up the hierarchy. I might say this is my opinion as well is that we focus so much on recycling we forget about reduction and reuse, and so I think that it's all about going through the hierarchy and actually focusing on those higher levels, and then, of course, waste reduction, recycling. But at the end of it that's the point we've been discussing a lot is that, like you said, there will always be residual waste and we do need options for landfills. So, yeah, we do need to get the planning and policy settings right for that.

Speaker 3 32:50

Yep, and I haven't even talked about energy for waste, because that's the next level.

Speaker 2 32:55

Well, there's so much we would love to talk to you about. I think I can definitely see you coming back on here in the future, andrew, if you'd be happy to do that. And yeah, we should definitely have a chat about energy to waste, because it's an area that I really know nothing about, so I'd love to hear from you about it. Okay, look forward to it.

Speaker 1 33:11

All right, well, andrew, thank you. Thank you for your seminars and thank you for coming on. Thanks for that, and you have other meetings planned, so we got to wrap it up here, okay.

Speaker 3 33:23

Thanks for joining us. It's good fun. Thanks a lot, mate. Catch you guys.

Speaker 2 33:27

See you, see you, andrew, bye-bye.