Australia's coal ash regulations are a "ticking time bomb" of serious environmental and public health concern, according to a report by Environmental Justice Australia (EJA).
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he not-for-profit group of lawyers are calling for a raft of changes to the existing laws, including stricter regulations for "coal ash dumps" and more onus on energy companies to rehabilitate existing land which may be contaminated by coal pollution.
"Coal ash dumps are the place where the waste material from the coal combustion process goes," report author and EJA lawyer Bronya Lipski told Xinhua.
"Generally in Australia, what happens is that the coal is burnt to make electricity and then the waste material - the coal ash - is mixed with water and pumped to enormous landfill sites quite close to the power stations," Lipski said.
One of the biggest concerns regarding Australia's coal ash dumps is groundwater contamination, due to a large portion of the country's dumps being unlined, as well as the potential for spills or seepage into nearby waterways.
"The reality is that these dump sites are a ticking time bomb right next to those communities that live nearby them," Lipski said.
"There has been some cases where the coal ash has dried out and blown over communities that live nearby these dump sites and have choked those communities for days on end until the wind has died down because they haven't been managed appropriately," Lipski said.
The toxins in coal ash, which include heavy metals like mercury, lead, selenium, chromium, arsenic and silica, carries the potential for a range of serious adverse health impacts.
EJA suggests seven changes regarding the management of coal ash dumps in Australia, including more consistency, oversight and transparency, aimed at making communities more confident that their health and environment are being protected.
"Most people when they think about coal, think about climate change, or they think about toxic air emissions - we very rarely think about what happens to the coal once it has been burned," Lipski said.
"The true cost of coal really has not been unearthed and once we start to look at the massive waste issue with coal ash, we can start to get a really big picture of the really severe environmental impacts that coal fired power stations have," Lipski said.
EJA has called for a state parliamentary inquiry into the regulation of coal ash dumps in Australia. ■