Why Macquarie Point needs a science centre

Tasmanian voters can be forgiven for thinking that a Hobart sports stadium is the only issue that counts in Election 2024. From the start of the campaign, the stadium (it needs no further identifier) has been front and centre in public debate.

You could sense the relief in Jeremy Rockliff’s government in late 2022 when he named Macquarie Point as the stadium site. After a decade of hope and disappointment as ideas aplenty appeared in the public spotlight and then vanished, the centrepiece for this priceless nine hectares of real estate was finally decided.  

If we’re to believe the official “plan”, Macquarie Point will essentially comprise a stadium and a working port, with small bits of land set aside for “residential and public foreshore” and “Antarctic facilities” respectively. The latter is all that’s left of an earlier idea for a “science and Antarctic precinct”, bringing together Hobart’s various Antarctic and Southern Ocean functions in a single location.

Back then the science precinct idea didn’t appeal to me. I saw little merit in spending millions just to move the Australian Antarctic Division from its established Kingston base, or CSIRO and the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies from their current Princes Wharf and Castray Esplanade locations. 

But that was before I learned of a proposal by Glenys Jones, who trained as a natural scientist before a career in heritage evaluation and science policy, and marine scientist Keith Sainsbury, an IMAS associate professor and former CSIRO senior research scientist.

Jones and Sainsbury raised their idea for a “Science Centre for Sustainability” in these pages in September 2020. They elaborated on it in October last year, around the time premier Rockliff and former premier Paul Lennon were arguing over competing stadium proposals. 

Needless to say, any public airing of their idea was drowned out by all the stadium noise, but their proposal is far too valuable to allow a sports stadium – whatever its own merits – to elbow it out of the way. 

It’s no accident that Tasmania is already home to more scientists per capita than any other Australian state, and their work is overwhelmingly focused on the natural resources from which we inhabitants of this island – and of the rest of the nation and the world – draw all our sustenance. 

As Jones and Sainsbury point out, besides CSIRO’s marine, atmospheric, agricultural and ecological research, Tasmania hosts complementary University of Tasmania research hubs covering marine ecology, fire research, agricultural and forest science. 

We’re also home to the national headquarters for Antarctic science, policy and administration,  the National Environmental Science Program’s Marine Biodiversity Hub, and the international Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), as well as the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. 

A Tasmanian Science Centre for Sustainability would serve all these functions, but it would be far more besides. In the inspired vision of Jones and Sainsbury, it “would communicate, inspire and advance innovation and excellence in science for sustainability [and] actively support informed policy, planning and decision-making for our collective community and planetary wellbeing, now and for future generations.”

The centre would “communicate, inspire and advance innovation and excellence in science for sustainability,… engage and connect experts with policy and decision-makers and community stakeholders across multiple sectors.”

Such a centre “would establish an active link between what the science tells us and what we are trying to achieve,” delivering robust science to support a growing role for Tasmania “as a global leader and exemplar of sustainability.”

At the weekend Jeremy Rockliff himself put the case for science supporting sustainability, in an election promise to boost flathead stocks through relocation and captive breeding. He pledged to “work with the best of science within … IMAS to ensure that we can do both”. All without imposing any additional taxes or fees.

This is almost believable – until you factor in the government’s record of chronic disregard of any sort of objective science in managing resource activities affecting the natural environment – most tellingly the failure to regulate Tasmania’s clearly unsustainable salmon farming industry, but also in mining, forestry and water use. 

How we fund science while ensuring that it remains objective is a perennial problem. In aquaculture, forestry, mining and agriculture, in Tasmania as elsewhere, it’s too easy to use commercial-in-confidence contracts and other means to hide bias in research outcomes to favour those providing the money.

We need science to be – and to be seen to be – a public asset. Jones and Sainsbury offer an opportunity to give long-neglected environmental research the public spotlight it deserves. There can be no better use for Macquarie Point.

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The unstoppable scourge of plastic

Every day our newspaper is delivered to the driveway wrapped in a thin film of plastic to keep it dry in wet weather. The papers are recycled, but every day the plastic goes to the bin – because landfill is the only disposal option.

It wasn’t always that way. For some years we squashed the newspaper wrapper into a huge bag along with other soft plastic scraps, at intervals dropping it into a depository in our supermarket. Along with other customers we had been led to believe that chemical wizardry could make our waste into something someone wanted. 

All seemed well – until the supermarket chains sheepishly admitted their contractors’ warehouses were overflowing with plastic waste. They abruptly terminated the scheme and we were back where we started. We’re still there.

The news is now filtering out that since different plastics have different chemistry, recycling unsorted mountains of plastic is very complex, and therefore expensive. We used to send our discarded plastic to Asian countries, presumably thinking they had the means to sort it, until they too started drowning in the stuff and told us to keep it.

Recycling plastic turns out to be a serious health hazard. Last November a plan for a global plastics treaty formulated by the Plastic Health Council, an international expert group studying its health impacts, included a demand for an end to all chemical recycling.

Promoting chemical recycling would be “the worst outcome” of any kind of plastics treaty, the scientists wrote. Said Swedish chemist Bethanie Carney Almroth, toxic chemicals in plastics complicate their reuse, including processing in closed-loop recycling systems.

The Plastic Health Council also called for an end to subsidies to plastic manufacturers, banning the sale of all products with unnecessary plastic by 2030, and making dramatic cuts to production of single use plastic by half within a decade and the manufacture of virgin, or unrecycled, plastic by 70 per cent this year.

This is a controversial position for any body of experts to take. Some of the world’s biggest and most influential corporations manufacture virgin plastics using chemicals derived from fossil fuels (oil or gas). They can be made to meet almost any need and, under present cost regimes, are markedly cheaper than recycled plastic. Most telling of all, they make up about 99 per cent of all plastics. 

Collecting, sorting, processing and moving plastics for recycling requires more time, labor, and equipment than making virgin plastic from fossil fuels, and results in a lower grade product – less bang for the buyer’s buck. Against that, governments pay billions to support extraction and processing of fossil fuels, a level of subsidy that will always put recycling at a profound economic disadvantage.

Authorities around the world have come to realise that recycling plastic is a mug’s game. “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling”, a detailed study released last month by the Washington-based Center for Climate Integrity, points out that the only current markets for recycled plastics are for polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic bottles and jugs. The rest is low-grade junk.

Other plastics collected in kerbside recycling are incinerated or sent to landfill. Even in the near-impossible event that they get sorted into their different chemical types, the huge range of colourants or other additives in use prevents their recycling. 

Recycling (or as the report more accurately describes the process, “downcycling”) can usually happen only once, rarely twice and never more often. The quality of plastic degrades as it is recycled, reducing the usability of recycled plastic. This degradation continues with more recycling, making recycled resins unsuitable for most purposes. This is especially the case for food packaging because of the tendency of recycled plastic to leach toxins.

Where does this leave plastic recycling? Except for a tiny proportion of particular kinds of plastic, it won’t work, hence the supermarket chains’ undignified retreat from their soft plastics program. The truth of the matter is that recycling any plastics, including plastic bottles, is a hit-and-miss affair, and more likely the latter.

Last year Tasmanian Environment Minister Roger Jaensch spruiked the long-awaited Container Refund Scheme “to improve waste management and resource recovery”, but neither Liberal nor Labor have made recycling plastics an election issue. 

The Greens’ policy to “ban all single-use plastics” is clearly the way to go – except that it can’t be done on a local, state or even national scale. World commerce dictates that only a universal prohibition will do – a prohibition on any plastic that for all practical purposes cannot be recycled. That is, pretty well all of it.

How’s that for a political challenge?

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In the dark, without headlights, headed for a cliff

We are now enduring the second election campaign since a University of Tasmania neuroscientist, Lila Landowski, drew attention in the Mercury’s Talking Point pages to the fact that ours is the only Australian state without a chief scientist.

It may be argued that the lack of a chief scientist is no indication of the value we place on science in helping us find our way. We have many scientists in government service – more per capita than any other jurisdiction except perhaps the ACT – who we can call on to give advice when necessary. 

But it gives pause for thought that Landowski’s plea, during the early months of Covid when fake news was demonstrably causing people to die, got no response from Peter Gutwein’s government, nor from the one that followed under Jeremy Rockliff. 

Landowski is far from alone. In the past decade or so, voluntary groups like Climate Tasmania and the Tasmanian Independent Science Council (TISC) have grown out of a concern that big decisions are being made about our future without the sobering voice of someone – anyone – with the training and expertise to make an objective call as to their enduring value and viability.

It’s no coincidence that both of these groups focus heavily on matters environmental. Climate change looms large, and Climate Tasmania has long pressed government for stronger emissions reduction and adaptation measures. But the state of the climate is one of many massively complex, interconnected matters that together will make or break our future.

As the demands of an ever expanding economy increases pressure on natural systems, last month TISC took the time to compile a list of major Tasmanian issues that call for scientific advice. 

Besides climate change, it is looking at management over many years in marine salmon farming, forests, wildfire, freshwater and irrigation, the rollout of renewable energy and the state of the environment report – and underlying all of this, transparency and integrity (or rather, its absence) in government decision-making. 

TISC has yet to complete deliberating on these matters, and I won’t be part of that process, but here’s my take on where those important matters lie.

Over a decade or more, successive governments have created policies in all these areas – if “policy” is the right term for a mishmash of disconnected decisions – with little or no reference to scientific evidence and expertise that is demonstrably free from commercial ties. That includes the influence that comes from industry support of research programs such as forest and marine ecosystems.

The result is minimal or zero planning and a welter of greenwashing and other falsehoods and misinformation. This has left Tasmania’s natural systems in a wide array of habitats, including waterways, forests, wetlands and sheltered coastal waters, exceptionally vulnerable to damage. And much damage has been done.

Freshwater management is one case in point. Resources in the Department of Natural Resources and Environment for monitoring and reporting on the state of rivers, streams and lakes are way below par and have been for years. Political decisions have been made to create new irrigation schemes supplying cheap (read: undervalued) water without the detailed multi-year data needed to understand the water source’s capacity to meet demand. 

Salmon farming is another. The UK and other jurisdictions prohibit intensive fish-farming in sheltered, poorly-flushed coastal waters like Macquarie Harbour and Long Bay near Port Arthur. For years we’ve been promised offshore farming in deep water where nutrients and waste have little or no impact, but it’s never happened because the government has to this point agreed with the industry position that environmental impact in current inshore locations is minor.

The impact on forest harvesting of new national legislation covering environment protection, biodiversity and nature repair is yet to unfold, but the long-term future management of Tasmania’s native forest estate may turn out to be much more consequential than either of the major parties is prepared for.

Regular, comprehensive State of the Environment Reports are a starting point for all responsible environmental management. Tasmanian law requires a new one every five years. The Tasmanian Planning Commission has had to prepare the next report in just two years with no new resources, so it cannot provide the comprehensive coverage of past reports in the 1990s and 2000s.

If, as promised, the next one is completed by the middle of this year, it will be the first since David Bartlett was premier, in 2009. in 15 years. We’re yet to hear a peep in the campaign about this lamentable dereliction of duty.

Rough terrain lies ahead. We’re travelling in the dark, and we’ve switched off the headlights.

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