5 articles on australian soil contamination, page-4

Hey whoa up here.

Mr Bradley and Mr Bradley?

There is the Mr John Bradley who is director general of DERM who was quoted this week:

The Department of Environment and Resource Management says the latest underground water quality tests found levels of the two substances remain within Australian drinking water guidelines.

Director-General John Bradley said the tests, carried out this week on 10 bores in and around the underground coal gasification plant, were consistently within the safe range.

And is this a different Mr John Bradley who has turned up as the Managing Director of Hardman Australia in the fifth article posted by Holymagimon from 2002 by Mr G Ryle, extract below:

"The department said it was tipped off by a newspaper advertisement early last year warning farmers of the practice.

It was placed by a Sydney company, Hardman Australia, which stopped making the product after it was undercut by cheap imports.

''What we are talking about is the dross from zinc smelters, the stuff that floats to the top," said its managing director, John Bradley.

''They take that dross because it is cheap and nobody wants it, it is a waste, and they refine that into zinc sulphate heptahydrate.

''In doing so they finish with very high levels of toxic waste metals within the product because it is not being made from clean material."

He said importers were exploiting loopholes that do not require products to be re-tested for potential heavy-metal contaminants once they reach Australia.

''The trouble is that the Chinese are giving testing certificates on the products. But they are just lies, that's the nicest thing I can say.

''If we made that material we would be able to survive too, but we would poison everybody. It is madness. They are turning farms into waste dumps.

''And for some of this stuff, if you contaminate your ground with it, you might render it impossible to ever farm clean vegetables again."

Mr Bradley said he discovered the practice after being forced to import the material: his company had found it uneconomic to keep producing a local product to strict Australian standards.

Concerned about the Chinese certification that accompanied one shipment, he had it tested. The laboratory found it contained 11 per cent cadmium - or 110,000 parts per million.

Mr Bradley said root crops grown in soil with cadmium levels as low as 0.3 parts per million could exceed World Health Organisation guidelines.

He said the company had been priced out of the market ''because we are honest. We don't want to poison people. Everybody when they go down to the supermarket to buy their vegetables could be buying toxic, contaminated vegetables."

Now, this could be sheer co-incidence and what a Holymagimon kind of co-incidence it would be.

Or, if its the same Mr John Bradley, you would think he would know a great deal about what and where those contaminated heavy metal fertilizers were used in Queensland in the past, and maybe even now?

Is it the same Mr John Bradley?