| 17 April 2007 | ||
| 4:00 pm | to | 5:30 pm |
PRODUCER: Julian Cribb
CHAIR: Brad Collis
SPEAKERS: Jack Ng, Ravi Naidu, Stevan Green
SESSION REPORT: This way to “zero waste”
By Christine Dell ‘Amore
The cocktail of chemicals that are the byproducts of a modernizing world pose an increasing public health burden to people.
Exposure to environmental contaminants such as arsenic, mercury and persistent organic pollutants (POPs), cause a range of health problems, from diabetes to cancer, while degrading Earth’s sensitive ecosystems. There are about 10 million contaminated sites around the world and 100,000 in Australia.
Tackling the problem means first determining a “dose-response”– or how much exposure to a chemical causes an effect, said Jack Ng of the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for Contamination, Assessment and Remediation of the Environment in Queensland. He was speaking at World Conference of Science Journalists briefing in Melbourne.
The CRC is developing a rapid response biological or chemical test to assess risk to potentially harmful exposure, which can be used real-time in the field.
“This represents a huge opportunity (for an organization such as ours) to develop methodologies to not only better quantify the risk but to remediate — to turn a waste site into a useful site,” Ng said.
For instance, many waste sites can be cleaned up and restored to residential neighborhoods or parkland. In Australia, the responsibility of clean-up is not mandated by government legislation, as in the United States, said Ng, and companies mostly fund clean-up efforts.
Remediation can also be approached through a sustainable prism, for example by reducing industry’s reliance on carbon dioxide, said Stevan Green, CEO of the CRC for Sustainable Resource Processing.
The polluted “red mud” from bauxite mining, for instance, can be neutralized by carbon dioxide from fertilizer. The carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, is then trapped in the less-toxic mud — a win-win situation, said Green.
Still, to really discern the interactions and health impacts of just 25 chemicals, 33 million experiments at $100,000 each would cost 3 trillion dollars — a staggering challenge for toxicologists, Ng said.
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