The project poses serious health risks for nearby residents and put dangerous toxins into human food chain. My family has a property that produces honey, vegetables and eggs. Their family with young children and their farm will be adversely affected by having this project so close to their home.

My name is Madeleine McGrath and I live in Murrumbateman. I strongly object to Veolia’s proposed incinerator being built in Tarago.

I believe that Veolia’s toxic industrial waste incinerator will severely impact the local environment and cause significant pollution. I believe I have a right, as someone who will be directly impacted, to object to the building of an incinerator. The project was deemed unsafe to be built near Sydney, yet the people it will impact here don’t seem to matter, and do not have a say, and I think that’s incredibly wrong. My concern is that the pollution will severely effect air and water quality, and will poison the environment with acidic gases, toxic metal particles such as mercury and lead, and dioxins. The persistent organic particulates have proven to decrease lung function, and contribute to cardiac diseases and even death. The waste that is going into the incinerator is deemed toxic and too harmful to burn “near populated areas” but you fail to see the capital of Australia, numerous small towns, and all the local wildlife as population. Veolia has proven to be completely negligent of safely managing toxic waste, due to their pollution recognised In the EPA prevention notice in October 2022. It was clearly started by the NSW government that the waste being expelled from this incinerator will have “no safe threshold of impact” due to the nature of the toxic waste. It is highly likely that my local town will experience significant impact, including contamination of the local produce and adverse health of the residence. At what point do human lives not matter? The project will permanently harm peoples health, lifestyle, and the environment and it will severely contribute to the already worrying problem of Climate Change. This Incinerator will contribute heavily to climate change by emitting 140,000 tonnes of C02 each year. This does not line up with Australia’s net 0 emissions by 2030 commitment. The recent State of Environment Report clearly states that the environment isn’t good, and its only getting worse. The damage this waste incinerator will output could be irreversible and kill people. Another Climate change concern is that Incinerators and other similar waste management projects are proven to reduce the amount of waste that gets recycled, and end up burning recyclable materials and polluting the air instead of giving them a 2nd life. It is an incredibly lazy, short sighted, selfish, risky, and dangerous method to get rid of sydneys trash and dump it directly into the environment and bodies of all the living things near it. The NSW Energy from Waste Policy states that incinerator proposals are only valid where “community acceptance to operate such a process has been obtained”. There is no community acceptance for a facility in Tarago or anywhere in the Southern Tablelands. Veolia’s track record shows they break the rules, hide information from the community and pollute the environment.
This project shouldn’t have even been an option and the clear disregard for the planet and human lives is disgusting.

I am a Local Farmer, Rural Real Estate Agent and Valuer in the Goulburn and Tarago region. I understand that in July 2018, the Eastern Creek waste incinerator in Sydney was rejected by the NSW Independent Planning Commission as not being in the public interest. The reasons for this rejection included concerns about safety, insufficient evidence that the pollution control technologies would be capable of managing emissions, concern about the relationship between air quality impacts and water quality impacts, the possibility of adverse environmental outcomes, and concern about site suitability and human health impacts. Since then, the NSW Government has banned toxic waste incinerators in Sydney due to the risk to human health. The risks have not changed since that decision back in 2018 – this project must also be rejected - If they aren’t safe for Sydney then they aren’t safe for Tarago.
The Tarago and Goulburn regions are part of a growth corridor between Sydney and Canberra. The popularity of the area (as being clean and green) for anyone wanting to relocate out of city localities, either permanently or for lifestyle purposes will be seriously diminished. We are also located within the Sydney Catchment area, with the potential to damage waterways and ecology in the catchment areas. Added to these reasons is the further financial burden placed on local land holders, who will be financially disadvantaged by lower land values and may impact any 'organic' certification status and therefore business profitability. There are far more suitable locations for this type of development west of the Great Dividing Range.

I object to having toxic incinerators burning rubbish and polluting the air quality we breathe.
This is not the way forward, this is backward thinking.
Australia is better than this! Stop killing our planet!

I moved to Tarago with my wife a little over 11 years ago. We chose Tarago because the surrounding area was beautiful, provided a reasonable commute to Canberra and Goulburn, and gave us a clean, rural lifestyle for our children who came soon afterwards. We’ve worked hard to make this our forever home, a place to raise our kids who can run around free and healthy outside in the fresh air and space.

But all of this – the home that I’ve built with my family – is at risk thanks to Veolia’s proposal to build an industrial waste incinerator.

The Veolia EIS and glossy brochures call it an “Advanced Recovery Centre” and that it will produce clean renewable energy using the world’s best practice technology. This is all corporate spin and blatant green washing.

There is nothing clean about this proposal. It will poison our agriculture, our flora, fauna and rivers, the water we drink from our water tanks, our people, my family, my children.

While there are so many reasons why this project should not proceed, I provide the below key issues to support my objection:
• The NSW Government acknowledges the harm that waste incinerators cause to health – their own Energy from Waste Infrastructure Plan 2021 states “populations can still experience health impacts when emissions are below the national standards, and for some common air pollutants, there is no safe threshold of impact”.

• A 2019 systematic review conducted by the ANU Medial School, Public Health Association of Australia and Council of Academic Public Health Institutions Australia published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health (Tait et al 2020) clearly concluded “there is insufficient evidence to conclude that any incinerator is safe” and in particular “contamination of food and ingestion of pollutants is a significant risk pathway for both nearby and distant residents”.

• While the NSW Chief Scientist and Engineer selectively left out the main conclusion from the above report in his report to the Minister for Environment in 2020, he still highlighted the risk to food production. The Tarago and surrounding area consists of prime agricultural land. Permitting a waste incinerator to be built here will threaten this multi-million dollar industry, and risk harming not just locals but those in the city who consume the meat and produce of this region.

• Toxins from incinerator emissions include acid gases, toxic heavy metal particulates (mercury, lead, cadmium) and persistent organic particulates (dioxins, furans, PCBs, PFAS). These will pollute our air, water tanks (when the pollution washes in from our roofs) and accumulate in the surrounding environment negatively impacting the health of our children, grandchildren and their grandchildren. This is an intergenerational burden which cannot be allowed to happen.

• While no level of emissions from a waste incinerator are safe for the surrounding community, Veolia has failed to even demonstrate they would be able to achieve NSW emission limits. State policy requires that they provide evidence from an existing reference facility using the same technology and waste feedstock to clearly demonstrate the proposal’s ability to meet regulatory requirements. Their own consultants admit in EIS Appendix L(i) – Woodlawn ARC BAT Assessment that “potential reference plants are not currently available to benchmark against all the requirements of the NSW EfW Policy as the requirements on energy recovery facilities are different in other regions; notably, the Technical Requirements for emissions standards”. So that means there is no conclusive evident that they would even meet NSW emission standards meaning the proposal must immediately be rejected.

• Tarago has been living with 15 years of Veolia breaching its licence conditions, polluting the environment, failing to genuinely communicate, and actively gaslighting community members who provide feedback or complaints. Hundreds of odour complaints are made every year, the EPA issues fines and prevention notices, yet nothing changes – Veolia is able to operate with impunity, negatively impacting the community while being rewarded with approvals for ever increasing volumes of waste to their Woodlawn Bioreactor landfill. Veolia is a bad neighbour and they have lost their social license to operate the existing facility. There is absolutely no community acceptance or social license to operate the proposed waste incinerator.

• The Tarago area is already surrounded with state significant projects including the Woodlawn Bioreactor, Woodlawn Bioenergy Plan, Woodlawn Mechanical and Biological Treatment (MBT) facility, Woodlawn Develop Mine (zinc & copper), Woodlawn Wind Farm, Woodlawn Solar Farm, Capital I and II Wind Farms, Capital Solar Farm, Collector Wind Farm and numerous other smaller, but still large scale quarry developments. As noted in the EIS, there are also an additional seven state significant projects in the pipeline. Tarago and surrounds are already suffering multiple negative impacts from these major projects from pollution to offensive odour, housing stress to unsafe roads from truck movements. This proposed incinerator would constitute an unacceptable cumulative impact to the local community and must not be approved.

• This project will provide no additional capacity for processing of NSW waste over the next 25 years (the life of the project). Veolia’s existing Bioreactor landfill can accept current waste volumes until 2047 and as they do not intend on raising their intake levels of waste from Sydney this will provide no waste management benefit to NSW and is simply pointless. It must be rejected on the basis it provides no additional capacity or benefit to NSW’s waste management.

• The proposal is bad for the environment and increase global warming – based on the figures in the EIS, it will generate an additional 85,777 tonnes of CO2 greenhouse gases each year on top of all the other toxic emissions that will pollute the surrounding community. The claims Veolia make that the energy generated would result in fewer emissions than a coal-fired power station are false and irrelevant. There are no coal-fired power stations in NSW that would reduce power production due to this project. Similarly Veolia’s claims in the EIS that incinerating waste is more environmentally friendly than landfill because it would prevent harmful methane emissions is false and deliberately misleading. The waste to be burned in this project would be diverted from their existing Bioreactor landfill at Woodlawn which captures the methane emissions and uses them to generate power in the BioEnergy plan preventing their release into the atmosphere.

• This project would actively work against moves to a circular economy – something the NSW Government has committed to achieving by 2040 (10 years before the proposed decommissioning of the incinerator). Waste incinerators discourage recycling by locking councils into long-term contracts forcing them to maintain volumes of waste rather than reduce, increase recycling and invest in innovative and more environmentally sound management. They take waste and convert it into toxic pollution and large volumes of hazardous ash which would be buried in the ground contaminating our soil and environment.

The health, wellbeing and environment of Tarago and surrounding communities is just as important as the people of Sydney who have been protected from the harms of these facilities, yet produce the rubbish it proposes to burn.

This project will decimate our town – those who can afford will move, those who can’t will stay and suffer, and the town will be locked into a toxic future. The growth and positive community outcomes the proponents claim are a total furphy – this will kill the town of Tarago!

The NSW Government and Independent Planning Commission must reject this proposal in its entirety, just like it did for the similarly toxic Eastern Creek Energy from Waste application in 2018.

My name is Mary Besemeres and I live in O’Connor, ACT. I strongly object to Veolia’s proposed incinerator being built in Tarago.

Veolia’s toxic industrial waste incinerator will affect the air that my children breathe. They already have health challenges, with autism, anxiety, and asthma. They have a right to clean air.

It will affect the lungs of everyone else living within distance of Tarago.

The incinerator is toxic to our health and environment. The points below outline how. It is an unacceptable proposal.

Veolia’s incinerator proposal will emit toxic air pollution 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for 25 years, which will spread throughout the region from Canberra to Goulburn, Braidwood, Bungendore, Murrumbateman, Gunning, Marulan, Yass and more.

Pollution from the proposed incinerator will includes acid gases, toxic heavy metal particulates (mercury, lead cadmium) and persistent organic particulates (dioxins, furans, PCBs, PFAS). Particulate pollution can lead to decreased lung function, cardiac disease and death. In addition to polluting the air, dioxins and furans will accumulate in the surrounding environment over time in soil and water and are absorbed by plants, crops and animals.

Food contaminated by incinerator toxins can cause cancer, miscarriage, infant deaths, developmental delays, reproductive issues, heart disease and respiratory impairment.

The proposal will create 2.2million tonnes of toxic waste ash, including 380,000 tonnes of air pollution control residue (fly ash) which is classified as hazardous waste by the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA). All of this will be dumped on site, risking further contamination of soil and groundwater as well as the Sydney water catchment. Veolia’s track record of polluting local groundwaters (recognised by EPA prevention notice in October 2022) proves they cannot be trusted to safely manage such toxic outputs.

This incinerator will impact the health of our children, grandchildren and their grandchildren through the accumulation of forever chemicals in the surrounding environment. It is an intergenerational burden and legacy which cannot be allowed to go ahead.

The NSW Government acknowledges in its own Energy from Waste Infrastructure Plan that waste incinerators impact human health stating “Populations can still experience health impacts when emissions are below the national standards, and for some common air pollutants, there is no safe threshold of impact”.

In 2019, academics from the Australian National University Medical School, the Public Health Association of Australia, and Council of Academic Public Health Institutions Australia completed a systematic review of the health impacts of waste incineration, which was published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health in 2020 and referenced by the NSW Government Chief Scientist and Engineer in his report to the NSW Minister for Environment that same year. This report concluded that “there is insufficient evidence to conclude that any incinerator is safe” and in particular “contamination of food and ingestion of pollutants is a significant risk pathway for both nearby and distant residents”.

The proposal has already caused significant detrimental negative impact to surrounding communities’ mental health by increasing anxiety and depression. This will only be increased if the project goes ahead as those living nearby continue to stress about when their health will start to show the impacts of the pollution from the facility, or having to stay indoors.

The proposed incinerator will exceed NSW government safety standards for air emissions during start-up, shut-down and many other ‘non-standard’ operating conditions. Veolia’s overseas incinerators often exceed safety standards and Veolia has a track record locally for failing to comply with license conditions at their existing Woodlawn facility.

Finally, Veolia's incinerator simply isn’t necessary.
At current volumes the existing Woodlawn landfill has a remaining useful life of 25 years. Implementation of the NSW Government’s circular economy policies will reduce volumes of residual waste, which will extend that life even longer. There is no need to divert one-third of waste received by Veolia in Tarago to an incinerator which will pollute the region when there is sufficient capacity already in their existing landfill which captures methane emissions to fuel/power generator that create and supply electricity to the grid.

I object to this proposal based on the following:

1. This blocks the opportunity to implement a circular economy framework which will reuse, recycle and repurpose waste in a cleaner process than incineration
2. NSW Government should be leading best practice in waste management, not going backwards to the industrial pollution management of the mid 1900's
3. NSW residents do not want toxic air and particle pollution which will have immediate and long term damage on health, agriculture and waste management practices.

Do not approve this or any other form of Incinerator in NSW.

Your decision will be your legacy to all current and future residents in NSW.

JUDITH LEVITT

I object to Veolia’s proposal to put a waste incinerator in our region. As a local I have spent the last 48years of my life doing my best to live a sustainable life. I have been very conscious of the seriousness of climate change which has been at the forefront of many scientists’ forecasts since the eighties. But politicians and big industries have chosen to ignore these warning until now, when it is too late to repair the damage.

I have placed a conservation order on my property and also over my last property, which sit within a 15km radius from the Woodlawn facility. The conservation orders cover 260 acres in total. These are registered over the titles on these properties and cannot be reversed. The reason for these titles is because most of the flora here is endangered as is the fauna.

Now Veolia comes along and threatens to destroy this all!!!
Shame on you. The futures of todays children will suffer the consequences of your actions.

I object to the New South Wales Government allowing this proposal to happen, it is a disgrace to think that you would even entertain such a poorly managed company to build an Incinerator anywhere in Australia. We are only custodians of the beautiful earth and should be protecting it for our children and our children’s children for seven generations.

I do not want my drinking water exposed to the toxins that will be generated and airborne by this incinerator, no amount of filtering will stop a nanoparticles getting into the atmosphere. This company can’t even stop the smell they currently create from reaching the entire region, how can they be trusted to control, fumes, steam and diesel burning from their generators. It is not good enough. The particulates, dioxins and heavy metals will end up in our rain water tanks and over 25 years end up concentrated in our drinking water.

This is not just a problem for the Goulburn council but for all councils, and class action is what you will be looking at if this for any ridiculous and unacceptable reason goes ahead. I object to this proposal and it should never be allowed anywhere in Australia.