In liberal
seats Whales play,
In Labor seats the fish are toxic and they'll stay
that way.
Sydney Fish Unsafe?
Planning NSW has held up the public exhibition of documents that cast doubt on the safety of eating fish from Sydney Harbour.
The EIS into the remediation of Homebush Bay says:
"If the EU (ed: European Union) fish dioxin standards were to be applied in NSW, then it is likely that commercial and possibly recreational fishing would need to be banned for much of Sydney Harbour as well as other NSW waterways, such as the Shoalhaven River (downstream of the paper mill) and in inland waterways in cotton growing areas." (p10 Detailed Human Health and Ecological Risk Assessment of Homebush Bay Sediments Supplementary Final Report December 2002, Sincair Knight Merz, in Technical Paper 5 of the EIS in Volume 4)
Page 52 of the paper makes clear that even with the proposed remediation of a strip of sediments in Homebush Bay, the intake of dioxin will not meet the National Health & Medical Research Council TDI of 2.3 pg TEQ/kg-day.
The proposed remediation may not be much help as the EIS also says:
"The results show that (for a non-resident keen angler) the preferred Remediation Option gives an average daily life time exposure of 13.2 pg TEQ/kg-day for the case where a High Protection level is required. This exposure significantly exceeds the WHO upper range TDI of 4 pg TEQ/kg-day and the NHMRC TDI of 2.3 pg TEQ/kg-day." p 59
"If the remediation strategy was to be based on satisfying the Worse Protection Case, remediating the sediments in Homebush Bay to an average background concentration of 0.49 ug/kg would produce an average lifetime exposure of 5.4 TEQ/kg-day, which exceeds both the upper range WHO TDI and the NHMRC TDI." p 59
This means that even after the proposed remediation most Sydney Harbour fish will probably still not be safe to eat according to EU standards.
Planning NSW should immediately exhibit this paper for consideration by the public, NSW Health, NSW Fisheries, NSW EPA and the Commission of Inquiry into the proposed remediation of the Meriton site at Rhodes.
While the consultants argue that the EU standard
might not be appropriate for NSW, it is expected
that in the same way there was initial resistance
to adopting the WHO 1998 dioxin standard which the
federal government now proposes we should even
tighten, we will eventually adopt similar
standards to those proposed internationally.