Campaign
Incinerators pollute the air, water and the environment.
Zero Waste Australia is a campaign of Toxics Free Australia. This campaign aims to educate and empower communities to defend themselves against waste incineration projects. While NSW, Victoria and Queensland have projects being pushed into regional agricultural areas, WA has already approved two massive incinerators for Rockingham and Kwinana in Perth’s southeast metropolitan region. After more than 10 years of delays, the WA incinerators are still not operational, demonstrating that a more sustainable Zero Waste city model could have been established and operating by now.
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Pesticide campaign
Australia’s pesticide regulation is in crisis. Following decades of reviews and inquiries into the Australian Pesticide and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) by successive federal governments, most recently by Clayton Utz, it is clear that our regulator of AGVET chemicals is heavily dominated by industry interests with major adverse impacts for farmers, our environment and public health. Our 100% cost recovery model of regulation has failed to protect our environment, leaving dangerous pesticide residues in our ocean, rivers, waterways, natural environments and food-chain. Many of these pesticide impacts involve chemicals that are persistent, bio-accumulative and toxic, undermining the health of the entire soil ecosystem, its biodiversity and threatening the viability of the very ground upon which the agricultural sector is built. These Persistent Organic Pollutants (POP’s) are the subject of international conventions such as the Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions and the Convention on Biological Diversity, to which Australia is a signatory. Australia’s obligations to these international conventions and their leadership role at international forums, is at stake.
The impact of failed pesticide regulation in Australia is cross-sector and long lasting, adversely impacting other industries and sectors such as fisheries, tourism, organic, regenerative and agro-ecological farming, drinking water sources, wilderness areas, biodiversity and our climate.
The health of farmers and their families are disproportionately impacted by AGVET chemical use, including through spray drift, and leaching of chemicals into the environment and waterways as well as pesticide residue impacts on the food grown and exported.
Similarly, urban applications of pesticides in children’s schools, daycare centres, parks and playgrounds poses foreseeable risks to the most vulnerable in our society – children.
Australia already has some of the highest cancer statistics in the world related to children and brain cancers. Hazardous pesticides and POP’s are known to be a related to cancer and many reproductive and chronic diseases in our society. Babies are now born with many more chemicals today than previously recorded, indicating intergenerational impacts that cannot be ignored.
Australia needs a robust, independent pesticide regulator that is free from the undue influence of chemical industry lobbyists, that puts our environment and public health ahead of industry interests and profits.
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