Opinion Piece by Sam Jones, Candidate for Let’s Get It Right
Southern Highlands Express
Plasrefine Does Not Stack Up
There are many reasons Plasrefine Recycling Pty Ltd, and its foreign owner Mr Lyu, should not be permitted to build an 18 metre tall plastics recycling factory in the Southern Highlands.
Firstly trucks – two hundred trucks per day will arrive in the Southern Highlands from Sydney, Canberra and Wollongong hauling 120,000 tonnes of their dirty plastic waste per year!
Then there’s the potential environmental devastation that this factory poses to our water and air quality. Noise emissions and vibrations will further impact the surrounding residential homes and threaten the riparian zone that exists on the site.
Lastly, there’s the contempt Plasrefine has shown our community. Plasrefine through its mouthpiece GHD, says it wants to be a ‘good neighbour’ by taking feedback from ‘nearby’ residents and the community. Yet at the most recent community consultation, members of the GHD team prevented verbal questions, used microphones to shout down residents who dared to speak, whilst eye-rolling those who didn’t accept their responses.
Plasrefine and its plastics factory is an abomination, ill conceived and should not be built in the Southern Highlands. If you also believe that 200 trucks a day is 200 too many, that the potential leaching of plastics into our waterways and into the air we breathe is too great a risk and that our community deserves better when it comes to ‘good neighbours’, then we all have the same problem.
So, once more, we will need to fight and say NO to Plasrefine in the Southern Highlands.
Sam Jones, Moss Vale resident and LGIR Candidate
