It`s slim with a plain green cover: Australia`s management plan for polychlorinated biphenyls
- Sustainable Solutions Pty Ltd/Australian Conservation Foundation, Victoria (Australia)
In November 1995, the Australian and New Zealand Environment and Conservation Council (ANZECC, the Council of State and National Environment Ministers) adopted a National Management Plan for PCBs. This was a significant milestone in the very long saga of Australian efforts to develop public policy and management structures for dealing with persistent organochlorine wastes. The author was part of a four-person consultation panel that carried out a public involvement program to assist and inform the process of developing the National Management Plan. The program involved, among other things, visiting every state and territory of Australia at least twice. This paper describes the development and delivery of the public involvement program, including ongoing interactions with Governments. The latter is often a complex (and many would say an unduly complex) matter in the federal system, where primary responsibility for waste management resides in the individual state/territory jurisdictions. The paper also attempts to draw lessons from the process. While some participants learned and acted upon some of these lessons quite early in the process, other participants (particularly governments) took longer to realize their importance and thus took longer to refrain from actions that might be regarded as not keeping faith with the activities they had set in process. Finally, the lessons learned here are contrasted with those drawn by participants in the process that led to the establishment and expansion of the Swan Hills facility in Alberta. While the outcomes of the Australian and Albertan processes appear to be very different, a number of the essential lessons to be drawn from the two processes are virtually identical. 13 refs.
- Research Organization:
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 567753
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-9611157-; ON: DE97009015; TRN: 98:000722-0043
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 1996 Pacific Basin conference on hazardous waste, Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), 4-8 Nov 1996; Other Information: PBD: [1996]; Related Information: Is Part Of Pacific Basin conference on hazardous waste: Proceedings; PB: 706 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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