I have to agree with Barry Chipman. Tasmania will be better off with this pulp mill. What a shame the Greens don’t understand the meaning of the words SUSTAINABLE and SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN TO BE ENVIRONMENTAL SAFE. Don’t expect any logic from the Greens, The vast wilderness between their ears encourages legalising illicit drugs, ooh yeah; these hypocrites’ ignore tons of scientific facts about drug abuse when it doesn’t agree with their emotional needs. Those in power need to wake up to themselves and made a sensible decision based on facts and not be lead about by noisy minority acting recklessly with the truth.

Any company intending to build any production capacity in this country has to include the cost and time of the EIA into the business plan. The project proponents have to present a cost, timeline and profit projection to the board and once this is approved they are held personally responsible to meet these.

As company boards tend to look very dimly upon uncertainty, a contingency has to be built into the project to cater for delays or additional costs.

The EIA process so far has now deviated so far from the mandated time and cost, that I am suprised the project is still alive. Any other company looking to invest in Tasmania will now have to add a huge additional cost contingency to the estimate.

The decision by the state to step in and bring the matter to the close would be a last ditch attempt to save the state's investment credibility, and to prevent the state being a permanent wood chip supplier to the rest of the world.

If anyone has any concern about pollution from a modern pulp mill, then they should visit a modern mill. The Visy mill at Tumut is a good example. It probably emits less than 1% of what older style mills do. The comments I have seen with regards environmental concerns seem to assume the old style 1950s technology with a few embelishments thrown in.

The economy of the town and surronding regions is booming. The influx of well educated and paid employees of the mill and its suppliers have revived a town that was slowly suffocating.

Future EIA assesments should have fixed deadlines and budget to make a report as would any professional organisation.

Johnno2

"What a shame the Greens don’t understand the meaning of the words SUSTAINABLE and SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN TO BE ENVIRONMENTAL (sic) SAFE."

Are you kidding? Are you actually claiming that hazardous stack emissions are "sustainable and environmentally safe?" How do you work that one out?

You did get the "scientifically proven" one right since the science proved long ago that NOx, SO2, PM's, CO, PCDD/F's, fly-ash etc are all environmentally destructive and are health hazards, some more hazardous than others.

I believe it is you who needs to include a degree of logic in your argument when slagging off about an issue of which you clearly know little.

Perhaps then you may "made (sic) a sensible decision based on facts" - facts based on the science of the hazardous industrial pollution in question, which you omitted to include in your abusive post.

Dickie me boy perhaps the following Q& A from the CSIRO web site regarding modern day pulp mills will help you understand that one of the three principles’ of sustainable development is environmental, and that principle is up front and equal with economic and social in any modern day development.

So let’s see what is being done to ensure environmental safe guards are in place to address your concerns.

Queston 7
What about the organochlorines produced in ECF and chlorine based bleaching, don’t they persist in the environment and eventually build up to unacceptable levels?

A7: The reason that the older chlorine-based bleaching technology is being phased out is largely due to environmental concerns over the levels of organochlorine by-products (measured using a term “AOX” that stands for absorbable organohalides – halogens are elements in the chlorine chemical group that also includes fluorine, bromine and iodine). In order to remove the organohalides from effluents from older mills, very extensive waste water treatment systems were required and those were very expensive.

It was found that when chlorine was replaced by chlorine dioxide in the bleaching sequence, most of the bleaching was done by the “dioxide” part of the molecule and the levels of AOX dropped by factors of between 10 and 50.

The organochlorines produced by the ECF process have been extensively studied and found to be degraded biologically and by sunlight to carbon dioxide and sodium chloride, so they do not accumulate in the biosphere in the way that certain obsolete chlorine-containing pesticides, such as DDT and chlordane, accumulate.

Dickie,
you need to get over it. The new mills use new technology, they are safe and clean.

It is indeed a shame that so many followers of the Greens are supporting a bunch of radical ratbags leaders. Even those “leaders” in Parliament appear to have a shallow depth of understanding on complex environmental issues. These green anti-capitalists won’t be happy until every chimney stack in the country is shut down, regardless of how small the quantities are of whatever they are emitting.

So tell me Dickie, if the Greens are so smart on environmentally toxic substances, NOx, SO2, PM's, CO, PCDD/F's, fly-ash etc, how come they want to legalise so many illicit drugs that clearly have been proven by scientist’s world wide to destroy the human body, soul and mind? That’s not slagging off at the Greens, it’s a fact.

Just how smart and informed on environmental issues are the leaders of the Greens? Read the following from Hansard from the recent sitting of the NSW Parliament. It exposes the raw truth…………These Greens did not confirm and it appears that they have not even had the decency to read a major environmental report—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, so you can expect the same vocal scaremongering in Tassie, backed by very little research on the subject. See http://radicalgreenwatch.com/sos/?p=26

Johnno2

I would prefer if you remained on topic and addressed or challenged the statements posed. I am not interested in debating Green policies.

Timberjack

Thank you for that information. Whilst I am familiar with the hazards of industrial stack emissions, I am not au fait with the current debate over the proposed mill. Nor does living on the other side of the nation help.

However, I would like your opinion on the following submission to the Tasmanian government in 2005, which does not paint a pretty picture for the occupational health and safety of workers exposed to the hazards in mills where the ECF technology is utilised.

Perhaps the document has been debated at length in previous relevant threads. If so, a brief comment will suffice.

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:lB5m7-P7uG0J:www.rpdc.tas.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/66351/Literature_Review_of_Epidemiological_Studies.pdf+chlorine+phenols+pulp+paper+mills+health+impacts+2005+tas.gov&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=au&lr=lang_en#11