this in Today's Sunday Tasmanian...a ten minute walk to Intec's offices from this plant. Anyone know if the Intec processes are able to deal with this kind of waste?
THE owner of Burnie's paper mill faces a massive bill for mercury decontamination of the site if it closes down.
While Paperlinx has disclosed a likely cost of $150 million for the clean-up, including redundancies, industry sources suggest the figure could be as high as $180 million.
Documents obtained by the Sunday Tasmanian under the Freedom of Information Act reveal the magnitude of the contamination. A ministerial briefing note dated February 2009 said the chlor-alkali mercury cell houses at Burnie and Wesley Vale each contained about one tonne of mercury.
"Losses of mercury occur to both water and air, leading to contamination of buildings, plant and soil," the briefing note said.
A water bore north-east of the Burnie plant is contaminated with mercury.
An Environment Protection Authority report said the decommissioning and remediation plan would need to "ensure that all contaminated material was removed from the site at site closure".
The Burnie and Wesley Vale sites are owned by Paperlinx subsidiary Tasmania Paper Pty Ltd, which is considering closure as one of four options.
The mills were excluded from a $600 million sale of Paperlinx assets to Nippon Paper last year.
Before the sale to Nippon Paper the owners had proposed demolition of the old cell house through a development application to the Burnie City Council. However, the EPA intervened.
"Ordinarily the demolition and construction of such a building would be considered an ancillary activity under the Environmental Management and Pollution Control Act," director Warren Jones wrote.
"However, there is a high degree of mercury contamination associated with the structure to be demolished which gives rise to significant potential for environmental harm."
Strangely, it may be the magnitude of the environmental problems that is keeping the mills open and preserving 500 jobs.
In its annual report Paperlinx said it had made no accounting provision for the cost of environmental remediation.
The Tasmanian mills reported a loss of $8.7 million in the year to June 2009.
Notes from the department's November 2008 site visit reveal that the Burnie site is contaminated throughout to varying degrees.
"It contains a number of tanks within that are also contaminated," the FoI documents say.
The decommissioning and remediation plan involves the encapsulation of contaminated material in bins sealed with concrete.
The Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment released just 31 of 333 pages of information, partly because disclosure under the Act would be likely to expose the company to competitive disadvantage by making known potential future liabilities.
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