MEDIA RELEASE  

Environmental and public water-rights advocacy group, Fair Water Use (Australia), has obtained a chart of the chemicals used during the production process at the Albury paper mill owned by Norwegian-based multi-national Norske Skog. The company is intending to expand the plant and insists that it will have no option other than to discharge “treated wastewater” directly into the River Murray.

The list includes agents such as Sulphuric acid, Phosphoric acid, Sodium hydroxide, Sodium hydrosulphite and Hydrogen peroxide, raising concerns that Norske Skog’s activities in Australia will have environmental impacts similar to those resulting from its widely-criticised New Zealand operations.

National coordinator of Fair Water Use, Ian Douglas, commented today, “To date, protests have centred around the single issue of the 1,500 tonnes of salt that Norske Skog intends to deposit into the river every year, purportedly offset by an ill-defined, and now discredited, salt mitigation scheme in a largely disconnected minor tributary of the River Murray; a project unacceptable to anyone truly concerned about the fate of the Murray-Darling.”

“However, Fair Water Use has now been informed that a range of other toxic chemicals may also find its way into the river along with the salt; effluent that, according to our sources within the plant, is gradually killing-off the timber plantations established by the company to receive the current discharge from the mill”, Dr Douglas concluded.

Given the disastrous pollution of Tarawera River, now sadly known as “the Black Drain”, by its Kawerau mill in New Zealand, Norske Skog simply cannot be trusted to care for the Murray. Fair Water Use is calling on Premier Keneally to show her environmental credentials, and thereby restore a measure of public trust in her Government, by personally blocking this inappropriate and cynical scheme to dump industrial waste into the River Murray.