Toxic waste in our midst: Towards an interdisciplinary analysis

Journal of Environmental Management 90 (2009) 1559–1566

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Toxic waste in our midst: Towards an interdisciplinary analysis Paul Brown* School of History and Philosophy, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 30 August 2005 Received in revised form 13 March 2008 Accepted 24 May 2008 Available online 20 September 2008

Intractable industrial legacies present new challenges to governance. Amongst the persistent organic pollutants, now managed internationally under the Stockholm Convention, hexachlorobenzene (HCB) stands out in all three classes of chemicals (pesticides, industrial chemicals and unintended by-products). This paper introduces twelve interdisciplinary papers contributing to our understanding of decisionmaking processes using a case study of HCB and industry–community relations in Sydney’s industrial heartland. In this collection, authors align new political theory and emerging management theory, and they analyse the case study from several disciplines. Disputes such as that over HCB destablilise the political/administrative/technoscientific regime that is the modern state. Citizens engage in ‘sub-political’ processes which require recognition of what Ulrich Beck and others have termed ‘individualisation’. This sees decision-forming and decision-making functions push outwards into community-driven structures. There we find new styles of public participation, resolution of asymmetries between knowledge and expertise, and new corporate behaviour. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Toxic waste Hexachlorobenzene Environmental policy Governance

1. Introduction We inhabit an environmentally conscious society that applauds and pursues ecologically sustainable progress. The great projects of a sustainable future might be considered to be reforms to energy and water systems, the maintenance of biodiversity and the guarantee of food stocks. But we also make our future by managing legacies of past industrial practices that would now be considered unsustainable. This paper introduces a volume of twelve studies, which explore the implications of toxic waste stockpiles for governance consistent with a sustainable future. By ‘governance’ we mean the organisational responses, policy development and structured decisionmaking across all sectors of society – communities, corporations and governments – and the streams of thought and action that flow through such processes, enabling co-ordination and control. Intractable industrial legacies present new challenges for governance. In this volume, we analyse these risk decisions in an unusual way – by giving focus to a particular chemical stockpiled at a single industrial site in one community, and by assembling multiple ‘voices’ who make their commentaries and draw their conclusions within a range of disciplinary frameworks, including: Organisational studies Urban environmental history

* Tel.: þ61 2 93851497. E-mail address: [email protected] 0301-4797/$ – see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2008.05.022

Risk management Politics Policy studies Business studies History and philosophy of science Environmental justice Ethics Law Environmental sociology and social theory The findings in this volume will be of interest to corporations, governments, and communities with new responsibilities for legacy issues. For example, there are important implications for the theory and practice of the communication and management of environmental risk, for corporate legitimacy and accountability, for government regulatory and decision-making processes, and for environmental justice – as these play out in changing global contexts. 2. International context International approaches to the management of the world’s most toxic wastes now find focus in the newly propagated Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs). Entering into force on 17 May 2004, the Stockholm Convention operates in tandem with the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, which effectively prohibits global trade in these same chemicals, and the Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure

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for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade. Together these treaties, with a number of other regional agreements, constitute a linked international POPS management strategy (UNEP, 2002). The national response to these conventions requires localised regulatory frameworks, policy decisions that permeate every level of government, education and promotion, revision of corporate responsibility, and actions which are collective and culturally embedded. Reporting mechanisms and on-going reforms of the conventions themselves ensure a dynamic process. For example, the Stockholm Convention charges its member nations with new responsibilities, including the need to develop a National Implementation Plan within two years of ratification. Such a plan requires POPs inventories, management plans, new government resources, consultation mechanisms, reviews of technical and management infrastructure in both public and private sectors, action plans, evaluation mechanisms, finance arrangements and programs of capacity building (UNEP, 2005a, 41–43). The creation of these plans is progressing at various rates, with certain developing countries assisted by the Global Environment Fund. Progress with the plans is reported to each Conference of the Parties, the first of which is took place in May 2005. Once endorsed as a global scheme of controls, the plans will effectively ban the production of POPs, prescribe consistent management and treatment of stockpiles, and establish disposal techniques which conform to world’s best practice (Table 1).

3. The case study In Australia, 2005 was an important turning point in the longrunning project of managing and attempting to dispose of one of these POPs wastes, hexachlorobenzene (HCB), stockpiled in the mixed industrial and residential suburbs of southeastern Sydney. Here the company Orica (formerly ICI Australia1) is storing HCB and related wastes at its site on the northern foreshores of Botany Bay, where its cluster of chemicals plants have long been controversial for local residents, government and other nearby industry (Fig. 1). HCB is a white crystalline chemical which was widely used between about 1942 and 1972 as a fungicide to protect seeds of wheat, sorghum and other grains while in storage. It is a by-product of the manufacture of industrial solvents, particularly carbon tetrachloride, and may also be present as an impurity in pesticides (IMOC, 1995). HCB is known to bio-accumulate in the food chain and laboratory testing confirms its role as a carcinogen in animals. It is classed as a probable human carcinogen (US DOHHS, 1997). Historically, the most important disaster caused by the chemical was the mid 1950s poisoning of whole communities in southeastern Turkey, where HCB was applied to grain supplies, contaminating the food chain, and causing the deaths of some 2000 infants who consumed contaminated breast milk. Several thousand adults were also affected, and, in medical circles, the plight of the communities became a major longitudinal study of organochlorine poisoning (Cam and Nigogosyan, 1963; Jarrell and Gocmen, 2000). The British experience of HCB includes the well known relocation of houses above Weston quarry, where ICI wedged and buried a stockpile of HCB and related chemicals against the quarry wall, leading to upward leaching of hexachlorobutadiene (HCBD)2 and significant contamination of residents’ homes (Department of Health, 2000). HCB has also been recognised as one of the key

1 ICI Australia became Orica on 2 February 1998. The change involved substantial share sales and with this the severing of ties to ICI’s UK parent company. 2 Hexachlorobutadiene (HCBD) is present in most accumulations of HCB. While HCB is not easily dissolved in water, HCBD disperses much more readily. For this reason monitoring HCB often involves recording the presence and concentration of HCBD.

Table 1 Persistent organic pollutants controlled under the Stockholm Convention Pesticides

Aldrin, Chlordane, DDT, Dieldrin, Endrin, Heptachlor, Mirex, Toxaphene, Hexachlorobenzene (HCB) Industrial chemicals HCB, Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) Unintended byHCB, PCBs, Dioxins, Furans products Adapted from US Environment Protection Agency (US EPA, 2004). Note that HCB appears in each of the three categories of waste.

pollutants of the Great Lakes area of North America where its management involves monitoring and treatment of contaminated deposits in lake and stream beds (Government of Canada, 1993). Meanwhile a wide range of monitoring and clean up operations has been undertaken in Europe where concentrations of HCB have been found in soils, groundwater and food (UNEP, 2005b). Further details on the history and characteristics of HCB are provided throughout this volume. The HCB ‘problem’ is part of Australia’s history of ‘intractable’ wastes.3 The 1992 decision not to proceed with a national High Temperature Incinerator (Rae and Brown, 2009) prompted alternative national management plans for the treatment of wastes such as PCBs, HCBs and organochlorine pesticides. These plans implied a decentralised national effort, harmonised across state boundaries, and involving relatively small scale technologies. For HCBs, located only at Orica facilities in New South Wales, the plan implied combined efforts by Federal and NSW State governments, in conjunction with Orica and the Botany community. Orica’s material is in two main stockpiles. The first is a wellbunded storage shed containing approximately 60,000 drums (10,500 tonnes) of relatively homogenous HCB (the ‘Drum Waste’). The second is a mixed low level waste (soil and other debris containing HCB, HCBD and other related chemicals) enclosed in a plastic shroud and buried beneath a large car park on the eastern boundary of the site (the ‘Car Park Waste’). After a decade-long search by Orica for an acceptable technology and a workable location, and following several stages of public consultation, an August 2004 Ministerial decision saw rejection of the company’s proposal to treat the Drum Waste at its Botany site using the ‘Geomelt’ process.4 With no alternative combination of technology and site on the horizon, a new phase of research and decision making commenced at the start of 2005. Orica has since pursued two options. Until late 2006, it sought to locate a viable site elsewhere in the state of New South Wales using rigorous criteria relating to community acceptance and technological efficacy. Recently an Independent Review Panel assessing progress with this option declared that finding such a site would be untenable (Wright et al., 2006, 6). The second option is international export, for which Orica has sought licences under Federal Hazardous Waste legislation which implements Australia’s obligations under the Basel Convention. The Australian Government, advised by its Hazardous Waste Technical Group, chose to grant these licences early in 2007. However, the German jurisdictions set to receive the waste for treatment by HTI have refused the import. This has created a new ‘stalemate’ likely to play out through legal proceedings, and/or

3 By the late 1980s, the term ‘intractable wastes’ was in common usage in Australia, essentially for those organochlorines that are now regarded as ‘POPs’. A ‘Joint Taskforce on Intractable Waste’ was established by the federal government in 1987, and in 1990 this taskforce made the ill-fated recommendation that Australia should adopt HTI. 4 Geomelt mixes toxic material with ‘clean’ material and melts this progressively using electrodes inserted into a large crucible. The result is the breakdown of HCB and the formation of a solid glassy residue plus off-gases which require further treatment. The process, which has been used ‘in situ’ for contaminated site clean ups, is further described elsewhere in this volume (Rae and Brown, 2009).

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Fig. 1. Location and surroundings of the Orica site in Southeastern Sydney. Notes: 1. Map adapted from Public Domain GIS data. 2. Scale: Grid lines are 1 km apart. 3. Sydney Central Business district is approximately 6 km to the north of the map. 4. Orica’s site lies within a triangular zone known as the Botany Industrial Park. The HCB drum shed is towards the southwestern boundary of this zone. 5. Dashed and dotted line indicates the boundary of Botany Bay local government area. 6. Street patterns represent residential areas including the suburbs of Mascot, Botany, Pagewood, Banksmeadow and Hillsdale. 7. The thin line towards the eastern edge represents the coastline of Sydney’s eastern suburbs. To the east of this is the Tasman Sea. 8. The river system in the north west corner is Cook’s River and other tributaries, one of three main catchments for Botany Bay. 9. Features protruding southwards into Botany Bay are the parallel runways of Sydney Airport. 10. Dark shaded areas indicate reclaimed swampy ground to the north of the Botany Industrial Park.

conceivably a new search for an Australian treatment process and an Australian site. Meanwhile, the Car Park Waste, thought to be secure within its high technology wrapping,5 has been leaking small amounts of HCBD, detected recently in groundwater near the site, and again propelling both company and community into a new phase of deliberations (Orica, 2005). This resulted in a program of engineering works to better contain the waste, to be followed by on-site treatment using either bio-remediation or a thermal oxidising process (Table 2).

4. Interdisciplinary analysis The papers in this volume will report and analyse in detail the processes of decision making associated with attempts to manage and treat Orica’s stockpiles of HCB waste at its Botany site. The collection tracks the HCB controversy up to about 2005, when attention turned to sites elsewhere in New South Wales and overseas. The interdisciplinary approach we adopt is outlined below, followed by an overview of key questions and themes considered in the eleven other papers in this special issue. This initial paper should be read in conjunction with the second contribution in the collection, ‘New forms of governance: the relationship between corporations, government and communities’, in which Sue Benn and Dexter Dunphy, both researchers in organisational studies, frame the overall inquiry as an exploration of governance and risk decision making, providing a more theoretical context. The opening part of the volume therefore places the

5 The material is ‘hypalon’, regarded as having a one hundred year lifetime (ANZECC, 1996).

Table 2 HCB in southeastern Sydney: a timeline 1940s 1950s–70s 1970s

1980s 1992 1990s

2001

2002 2003 2004 2005

2006

2007

Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) established at Botany. Manufacture of solvents; creation of HCB stockpiles. Land disposal and sea dumping (used for other hazardous wastes) rejected as options for HCB; storage of drummed high level waste in a ‘drum shed’; storage of low level waste under a ‘car park’. Incineration of HCB and other chlorinated wastes under consideration by Australian industry and governments. High Temperature Incineration rejected by Australian Government. National Advisory Body on Scheduled Waste established, and Management Plan for HCB (and other scheduled wastes) devised. ICI commences a study of available technologies. Orica (formerly ICI) proposes treatment at its Botany site using ‘Geomelt’, a batch melting process. Environmental Impact Statement released and public consultation commences. Commission of Inquiry supports Orica’s proposal. Additional study commissioned by Minister for Infrastructure Planning and Natural Resources. Independent Panel of experts recommends and the Minister agrees that HCB Drum Waste should not be treated at Orica’s Botany site. New planning phase commences. Orica declares its intention to improve its community engagement efforts around its legacy and remediation projects. Orica conducting evaluation of Drum Waste treatment sites in (rural) New South Wales, while exploring overseas export as an alternative. Car Park Waste newly secured by engineering works, with further onsite treatment under consideration. In October, Independent Panel declares that the search for a NSW site for Drum Waste treatment is unlikely to succeed. Australian Government, with advice from Hazardous Waste Technical Group, agrees to licence export of Drum Waste to German HTI facilities. German jurisdictions rule that HCB import is illegal. Repackaging of Drum Waste, ready for export, proceeds at Orica’s Botany site.

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case study in the context of emergent forms of governance for environmental risk that require relationship building between corporations, government and communities. In the second part (four papers) we explore HCB, the chemical, and its history and politics, as well as the ‘place’ and the ‘community’ where the stockpiles are located, and the corporation which is the ‘guardian’ of the waste. Decision-making processes relating to the waste are laid out within their historical context. These papers also record the conflicting voices of stakeholders in the dispute, including local residents, NGOs, corporate managers and scientific experts. The six papers in the third section of this volume are specialist analyses of the implications of the case study. Authors use a range of theoretical frameworks (see above) to examine the dilemmas for contemporary organisations and for risk communities, and to relate these dilemmas to the changing trust relations between the stakeholders. The papers offer new perspectives, leading to an interdisciplinary model of governance associated with environmental risk in what Ulrich Beck and others have termed ‘subpolitical’ arrangements (Benn et al., 2009b). Key themes of the overall research project can be grouped as follows: Urban organisation and change Policy processes and decision making Public participation and trust Corporate symbolic capital and business ethics Science and knowledge Governance and challenges for organisational legitimacy An introduction to each of these areas occupies the remainder of this paper.

5. Urban organisation and change Botany Bay and its foreshore suburbs have long been regarded as a ‘sink’ for Sydney’s dirty industry. The Bay is the famous site of first European landings in the Sydney region, and it might have become the centre of commerce and administration, but for the discovery of a deeper more picturesque harbour a little further north.6 In addition to the cluster of chemical plants at what is now the Botany Industrial Park, a range of high polluting industries, including port facilities, petroleum refineries, tanneries and waste disposal plants – ‘anything that smelt’ – characterised the region. In this respect, the area is in some ways comparable with industrial heartland regions such as the Mississippi Valley, the Rhur Valley, or the Richmond/Oaklands foreshore areas on San Francisco Bay’s east side.7 Today the Botany area is a mix of residential and industrial sites, and sixteen thousand people live within 1 km of the chemicals plants which occupy the Botany Industrial Park. This includes sites currently owned by Orica. Orica’s attempts to retrieve and retain a trusting relationship within its community are elaborated in several papers in this collection. While Orica has responded from the need to maintain symbolic as well as economic capital (Benn and Jones, 2009, and see below), new imperatives related to Sydney’s overall urban development have helped determine outcomes in the HCB dispute. Arguably one of the reasons why the State government is reluctant to approve a new HCB treatment plant in Botany is that new residential development, along a planning corridor south of Sydney’s

6 The now famous Sydney harbour, with its iconic built environment and carefully preserved foreshore parklands, is now graced by a State government policy of removing all industrial functions and rejuvenating old wharf and factory sites as residential and commercial developments. 7 The Botany industrial area in southeastern Sydney is smaller in scale than any of these places mentioned.

central business district, sees increasing demand by developers for a demonstrably ‘clean and green’ environment. This planning corridor now extends perilously close to the old industrial sites in Botany. In her contribution to this collection, Peggy James proposes that the issue of managing the environmental risk of HCB waste needs to be considered in the context of the historical geography of the area where the waste is located. Hers is an urban environmental history in an environmental justice framework, and she analyses three periods of Sydney’s history: Early Industrial, Keynesian and Post-Keynesian Sydney, exploring key policy interventions that have shaped Sydney’s development (James, 2009). This provides important context for understanding the current HCB dispute. James provides an environmental justice interpretation of changes in the areas surrounding the Botany Industrial Park, building her analysis of the HCB dispute from Giddens’ (1990) proposal that surveillance or social supervision, or what might be alternatively termed governance, is an important institutional dimension of modern society. James points out that important social issues, such as the management of HCB waste, cannot be understood outside of their temporal and spatial contexts, because those contexts have been created through the exercise of social power. The current conflict between the interests of industry grappling with legacy issues, government intent on reorganising the city, and residents determined to make for themselves a better home is a power contest in which, according to James, the community is not benign. And although through the last fifty years residents may have seemed ‘invisible in the shadow of factory walls’ (Brown, 2002), it is the exercise of power by agents in the community which has played a critical role in how the HCB dispute plays out. This is explored by several authors in this volume. 6. Policy processes and decision making Another aim of this overall project is to draw conclusions about the democratisation of risk management from a history of decisionmaking structures and policy processes relating to management of POPs wastes. The HCB case study sheds light on a hierarchy of participatory decision-making structures put in place in the 1990s to manage ‘intractable’ wastes. The 1992 HTI decision saw new community consultation protocols introduced in association with the alternative management plans (Rae and Brown, 2009). A National Advisory Body8 was established. For HCBs, this led to the establishment of the local Community Participation and Review Committee (CPRC), a representative body of which Orica, local government and residents are members. All the papers in this collection comment on one or more dimensions of the CPRC work. The CPRC has responsibility to receive, request and distribute information, consult the local community, participate in relevant process, and review and advise the State EPA and Orica on relevant proposals, including monitoring and implementation of the management plan. The committee has exerted considerable influence through the way it processes and extends technical knowledge, and also because it creates several critical conditions that have allowed (provisional) trust to emerge out of longstanding adversarial relationships (Rae and Brown, 2009). Streams of policy-making and action have flowed behind the scenes, for example in the relationships between Orica and State government departments. Arguably, by 2003, after what seemed an exhaustive process of consultation, Orica, the NSW Planning

8 Officially this was the National Advisory Council on Scheduled Waste, though it is commonly referred to as the ‘NAB’.

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Department9 and the NSW EPA had reached a level of comfort with Orica’s proposal to treat the Drum Waste at its Botany site. This not entirely public concordance of views was backed by the recommendation of a Commission of Inquiry (COI). The Minister’s reversal of the COI recommendation came after a new phase of lobbying by residents and local government, and represented the retrieval of decision making ‘in public’ (Hillier et al., 2009). The Minister’s decision, based on findings by an ad-hoc ‘independent review panel’10 makes something of a curiosity out of the COI process – the COI previously thought to be something of a ‘court of final review’; and it opens up questions about the characteristics of modern ‘individualised’ decision making, which are taken up by Benn and Brown in the concluding paper in this volume (see also below). Writing from a policy studies perspective, Cathie JensenLee (2009) deals in detail with the COI from its establishment by the NSW Department of Planning, across its public hearings and submission processes, through to its recommendations and their implications. She analyses the COI in light of the literature on democracy and democratisation, and argues that the standard operating procedures of the Inquiry ensured that all stakeholders were treated equally. However, residents, with extremely limited resources for making technical arguments can be regarded as unequal to Orica, other industry or government. Jensen-Lee concludes that therefore equality was purely formal, and argues that treating unequals equally results in the circumvention of deliberative democratic ideals by perpetuating entrenched structural inequalities while nonetheless giving the superficial appearance of fair play (Jensen-Lee, 2009).

7. Public participation and trust Nothing much has dinted the cynicism about participatory practices, which abounds amongst radical environmentalists. For example, analyses by Sharon Beder and Janis Birkland are scholarly expressions of this dissatisfaction. Beder is well armed with her knowledge of how industry uses public processes to defeat environmentalists (Beder, 1997) and, for example, she has visited the HTI dispute and found only arrogant public relations exercises designed to allay public suspicion. These, she argues, are disguised as ‘consultation’ but demonstrate how the chemical industry deliberately sets out to build a ‘therapeutic alliance’ with the public, to rectify what is seen to be the irrational fear of communities faced with hazardous industry in their midst (Beder, 1999). Meanwhile, in an ecofeminist critique, Janis Birkland laments the predominance of ‘malestream’ structures, which seem incapable of fostering unity between citizens and experts (Birkland, 1999). Even more recent studies of sophisticated power-sharing processes of public participation, such as citizen juries and other ‘deliberative’ procedures, have highlighted the tensions inherent in structures hard won by citizens clamouring for involvement, though sometimes barely tolerated by government and industry stakeholders (Hendricks, 2002). The theme of public participation, and questions about how to make it effective, run through all papers in this collection. For example, Rae and Brown (2009) see public participation as a matter of trust, with that commodity ebbing and flowing in the relationship between ICI/Orica and its community across fifty years. There is a question about: why the HCB decision-making processes work at all, given the history of dispute in Botany, and the sort of contention that exists over technical expertise. What keeps the various parties

9 By 2004, the Planning bureaucracy in New South Wales had been folded in under a new Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Natural Resources. 10 The NSW Minister for Planning convened this panel in 2003.

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coming to the table in search of negotiated solutions, and what might sustain work by all stakeholders in a situation almost at stalemate? (Rae and Brown, 2009). For some of the answers, Rae and Brown defer to work on provisional forms of trust by Gavan McDonell, the first convenor of the Joint Taskforce on Intractable Waste (see above), who used the HTI case study to explore the connections between the formation of ‘technoscientific’ knowledge and the processes of engendering trust (McDonell, 1997). McDonell argues that trust and judgement are more fundamental to everyday management of risk than knowledge and rational choice, and then introduces the concept of ‘suspended doubt’, a fragile condition moderating distrust between stakeholders with their desire to find common ground in search of solutions to intractable problems (McDonell, 1997; Rae and Brown, 2009). In various ways, authors throughout this volume explore the fragile elements that deliver suspended doubt in the HCB dispute. For example: 1. Several authors have explored the stretched credibility (on the part of industry and community alike) afforded to government decision-making processes, ranging from unease about the equivocal Commission of Inquiry episode to new consternation targeted at the federal level over Australia’s commitment to the Stockholm Convention. 2. The successes and failures of the CPRC are judged by several authors who point out problems with its representativeness – viz a viz the ‘atomised’ citizenry of Botany, the majority of whom remain ill informed about the HCB issue (Jensen-Lee, 2009). A sophisticated community information system has been devised in consultation with the CPRC and local residents (Lloyd Smith, 2009). Nonetheless, as the dispute continues across several decades, the danger remains that individuals (whether from the company or local resident groups) will function as a club of expertise remote from unaffiliated citizens. 3. In many stages of the dispute, technical information backed by scientific studies has been regarded as the most valuable commodity by all parties. Yet, as detailed by Healy (2009) there has been glaring asymmetry in the availability of scientific expertise. The theme of scientific expertise and knowledge is separately considered, below. 4. Although the CPRC and its antecedent consultation processes were, for a time at least, regarded as ‘best practice’ by industry, environment groups and government (Brown, 1998; Rae and Brown, 2009), the HCB case could be judged a public participation failure given that the CPRC in combination with Orica, the corporate sponsor, was unable to agree on a mutuallyacceptable technological pathway (Carson, 2009). 5. Political history and the story of urban change in the Botany area (see above) would seem to provide a deterrent to irresponsibility on the part of the company. However, concern remains both in government and amongst community groups that Orica’s economic situation, which has fluctuated across the years, means uncertainty in the provision of organisational support and funds. This is explored by Benn and Jones (2009). To summarise, the HCB story demonstrates a shift in the nature of public protest and citizen involvement. Whereas the precursor HTI dispute was fought in communities unfamiliar with highly toxic industry, Botany is a place where distrust of industry and government runs deeper and longer than in almost all other Australian communities (Rae and Brown, 2009). There is a view that Orica’s unsuccessful quest to deal with its stockpiles, and other important groundwater contamination problems associated with six decades of manufacture at its Botany site, have driven down the company’s

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symbolic capital (see below) and stretched those financial and human resources it devotes to environmental management. As one response, after 2004, Orica embarked on rationalisation of its public consultation mechanisms, in an attempt to ‘take a step back’ in managing both its legacy issues and the historically prickly relationship with the local community. This is another way in which February 2005 provided a turning point after which, appropriately, we can assess this long-running risk controversy. 8. Corporate symbolic capital and business ethics From about the late 1980s until the present day, most large corporations have responded to international efforts to ‘green’ industry within a framework of ‘ecological modernisation’.11 The response includes organisational reforms such as the inclusion of environmental management teams at senior levels, the implementation of systematic approaches involving Environmental Management Plans, adherence to international standards, and compliance with ever-widening environmental regulation. As ethicist Damian Grace explains in this volume, internal cultures shaped by new awareness of business ethics, public expectations, and sometimes the demands of their own shareholders, have helped drive such reforms (Grace, 2009). Orica’s public image continued to deteriorate significantly between 1989 and 1996, as resident action accompanied by investigative media coverage intensified, in response to a series of accidents and pollution incidents (Brown, 2002). The company responded with a range of ‘good neighbour’ activities, a new Safety, Health and Environment program linked to five-year plans for improved environmental management and structures such as a Community Liaison Committee, a Groundwater Committee and the CPRC. Through such responses, widely regarded as fragile, Orica has attempted to rebuild trust and credibility (Brown, 2002). In making her critique of the CPRC and the company’s approach to public participation, Lyn Carson, in this volume, argues that the CPRC has been too preoccupied with its review function, and proposes that Orica should have instead installed: A diligent participation working party [which] could have created a much more effective public participation plan, grounded in the core values of professional public participation practice (Carson, 2009, 1) With this broadside, Carson, who is a consultant specialising in public participation processes, questions Orica’s fundamental commitment to genuine public participation, and laments the company’s failure to implement best practice deliberative techniques. Benn and Jones (2009) further argue that the operations of the CPRC, and Orica’s recent attempts to redress poor practice, demonstrate the importance that corporations now need to place upon on the generation of symbolic capital: The issue of identity is therefore crucial in these struggles between stakeholders in risk disputes. However, identity stems from symbolic interaction in both internal and external relations of the organization. It follows that internal perceptions must align with external image if the organization is to build the cohesive identity necessary to build symbolic power (Benn and Jones, 2009, 10). From this perspective, the HCB case study reflects a growing tendency for business to engage local communities directly in dialogue forums as a way of building corporate legitimacy, developing trust and generating symbolic capital. Benn and Jones (2009)

11 This simplification isn’t meant to deny difficulties in defining a consistent view of what ‘ecological modernisation’ might entail.

argue that in recent years, governments have supported such initiatives as forms of ‘reflexive regulation’ (in legislative terms ‘adaptive legislation’) which can enable corporate self-confrontation, self-regulation and the development of a more socially and environmentally responsible corporate culture. But Benn and Jones also argue that as public scrutiny intensified, for example through the CPRC with its ever more literate community membership able to mount significant technical arguments, Orica has at times reverted to its science-based corporate culture, so that ‘the negotiations between the stakeholders reflected competing discourses in which actors prioritized the building and maintaining of identities rather than an active collaboration to solve the ongoing issue of the waste’ (Benn and Jones, 2009, 19). In an interesting twist, Orica’s strong identity as a scientific organisation was not systematically challenged by powerful environmental groups such as Greenpeace, who in other disputes have successfully built their own identity as scientific experts. In the earlier controversy over HTI, Greenpeace worked closely with local communities, providing a steady flow of scientific argument transplanted from the European and North American anti-incinerator campaigns. Yet in the dispute at Botany, Greenpeace was tentative to side with residents since, like Orica and both State and Federal governments, it favoured on-site treatment of the Drum Waste.12 This position assisted Orica to build a picture of resident opposition as being built on individualised utility (NIMBY), rather than a more radical and broad-ranging critique of either the technology or the distribution of risk (Benn and Jones, 2009).

9. Science, knowledge and trust In the HCB dispute, difficult challenges concerning access to knowledge and expertise have always been present. For example, the requirement to engage with vast amounts of technical detail in order to participate has posed one of the main threats to the effectiveness of the CPRC, and the preservation of suspended doubt (see above). Residents are ever wise to the conditions characteristic of much participatory process. Powerful social groups (industry, government) seem readily able to marshal ‘hard science’ while residents can’t, and whenever technical evidence is employed, it remains legalistic and technocratic, to the disadvantage of residents (Irwin, 1995). Scientific studies and the negotiation and circulation of scientific findings play their part in the HCB controversy, and for several authors in this collection, they provide an important focus for understanding participatory processes and matters of governance. Apart from the numerous studies required for Orica’s Geomelt proposal and its environmental impact statement, there have been experiments running to determine whether bio-remediation is a viable treatment for the Car Park Waste, a monitoring program to determine the extent of any leakage from the car park, or deterioration in the plastic (hypalon) shroud, and bench trials of thermal oxidation processes suggested for treatment of the Car Park Waste. All these studies are controversial for local residents concerned about contamination; and they must either rely on scientific arguments presented by company-funded researchers or mount and win the case for funding to allow them to conduct their own scientific assessment (Hillier et al., 2009). Literature on the relationship between lay and scientific expertise seems to advocate a meeting made on equal footing between what might seem to be

12 Until 2004, Greenpeace held to a strong view that stockpiles of toxic waste should be treated as close as possible to their current location. Although Greenpeace opposed Geomelt as a viable technology, its opposition was muted in public meetings and a strategic alliance with local residents was not formed until after the Commission of Inquiry made its recommendations in 2003.

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incommensurable knowledge bases, or sometimes calls for the appropriation of lay expertise to the cause of scientific knowledge making. But what’s important about the HCB work, at least at the committee level, is the great enthusiasm with which local residents seek to appropriate scientific knowledge to their cause, with the sort of unquestioning positivism that sidesteps challenges from the sociology of science. In the world of risk as it plays out at the frontline, the citizens continue to cry out for certain certainties. Stephen Healy, in his study of knowledge and expertise for this collection, gives focus to the employment, by non-company members of the CPRC, of an industrial chemist using ‘arms length’ funding from Orica. Nancy Hillier and other residents also provide their perspective on this (Hillier et al., 2009). The aim was to put in place the residents’ own scientific advisor, who could comment on the safety of particular proposals, question company scientists in a critical way, and where necessary translate complex technical information into a form that made sense to residents. Healy writes from a sociology of science stand point, and he uses the episode, which ended in Orica’s use of the expert’s findings to support its proposal for Geomelt used on site, and therefore his ‘sacking’ by residents,13 to explore asymmetries in access to expert knowledge and closely related matters such as trust deficits between key stakeholders (Healy, 2009). He uses an analysis of the ‘knowledge politics’ of the CPRC to argue that the Habermasian ideals framing the committee’s work and the philosophy of knowledge they embody are flawed: Habermasian communicative ethics centre upon the notion that fair, free and open forms of debate and communication ensure that no one form of reasoning and/or knowledge dominates others, and so commonly frame attempts to facilitate public participation in technical decision-making. However, in practice, Habermas’ advocacy of ‘the power of the better argument’ supports adversarial debate and favours conventionally validated (i.e. scientific) forms of knowledge over others (Healy, 2009, 1). Healy goes on to argue that common understandings of what passes for knowledge render lay contributions of secondary status, even seeing them as ‘values’ rather than credible ‘knowledge’, and that this: supports ‘deficit model’ approaches (the belief that public antipathy results from knowledge ‘deficits’ resolvable by expert mediated enhancements in technical literacy) (Healy, 2009, 1). Elsewhere in this volume, Mariann Lloyd Smith’s study of the HCB community information system suggests such systems can go some way to addressing the outstanding issues of information access, power and environmental justice. Lloyd Smith has a legal background and long experience of environmental NGO politics. A key Australian contributor to the development of the Stockholm Convention, she argues that community information systems are also an effective response in addressing the five crucial elements of a toxic dispute, that is, the dialogue, capacity building, information access, evaluation of hazards and risk, and expertise. In the circumstance of asymmetrical access to technical expertise, participants are empowered through the cooperative learning

13 The scientist conducted his own review of Geomelt and Ecologic systems of treating HCB, and concluded that both were viable if well managed, with Geomelt marginally preferred. In his reports, he was silent about where treatment should take place. Orica publicised these reports, claiming they supported the company’s proposal to use on-site treatment of Geomelt. This was enough to see residents distance themselves from their own expert, and his position became untenable.

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environment where information is consolidated, expertise is sourced and capacity is built (Lloyd Smith, 2009).

10. Governance and organisational legitimacy In their framework paper for this volume, Sue Benn, Dexter Dunphy and Andrew Martin explain the new ‘openness’ of decision-making structures used by powerful bureaucracies and corporations, faced now with the demand for equitable distribution and management of technological risks. They raise two questions: 1. How equipped is the traditional body of democratic theory to deal with these issues of governance? 2. Can the leading concepts of management theory and the norms of management practice guide the development of appropriate models of democratic governance? In developing their framework, which in turn guides the broad brushstrokes of analysis in this volume, Benn, Dunphy and Martin present a new characterisation of governance issues in an ecologically sustainable society. To some extent, this follows while adding detail to the contours mapped by environmental politics specialists who seek the norms essential to a ‘green state’ (Eckersley, 2004; Drysek et al., 2003). However, what distinguishes Benn, Dunphy and Martin’s approach is their synthesis of new political theory and emergent management theory, leading to prescriptions about the necessary reform of governance styles and structures. For Benn, Dunphy and Martin, new political theory elaborates reflexive modernisation, deliberative democracy, radical pluralism, new institutionalism, ecological modernisation and ecological democracy; while emergent management theory gives focus to stakeholder interaction, narrative theory, leadership styles, cultural framing, bridging social capital and reflexive management. They show how the common ground between these two streams of thought and action can lead to practical outcomes and new governance styles and structures, for example:  Community based networks are included in multiple stakeholder arrangements which link different types of knowledge and facilitate knowledge creation.  A shared ‘ecocentric’ understanding can develop across organisations.  ‘Feminine’ leadership styles support a diversity of values, knowledge, experience and opinions.  Cultural framing and analysis of stakeholder identity improves strategies for organisational change.  Open and reciprocal communication systems build trust and enable knowledge sharing between organisations.  Reflexivity is built through engaging in extra-organisational tasks.(Benn et al., 2009a, Table 2.1). The HCB case study allows an exploration of how such initiatives arise and begin to play out in a complex and long-running conflict which is characteristic of Ulrick Beck’s ‘risk society’. The overarching objective of all authors in this volume is to contribute to such an exploration. In the final paper, Benn, Brown and NorthSamardzic empirically substantiate key concepts of risk society theory through the HCB case study, seeing it as an example of stakeholder management of environmental risk in an individualised and reflexive risk community. The events of the study support ‘risk society’ predictions concerning the legitimacy problems faced both by governments as they attempt to manage the risk, and by corporations as they (typically) harness technoscientific support for product and process innovation, without due recognition of social and environmental risk.

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11. Conclusion Social negotiations about industrial legacy issues expose the underbelly of democratic decision-making, and disputes such as that over HCB destabilise the political/administrative/technoscientific regime that is the modern state. Stockpiles of toxic chemicals will remain until there is both maturity in technical systems and environmentally just approaches to decision-making. This means the sophistication of sub-political processes requiring recognition and legitimation of what Beck terms individualisation. In such processes, both decision-forming and decision-making functions push outwards into the arena of community-driven structures populated and controlled as much by individual citizens and their representative groups as by government and industry officials. There trust is an invaluable commodity, allowing opposing sides to discover ‘that which it is necessary to do’ about seemingly intractable problems (McDonell, 1997); and emerging from these social negotiations are new possibilities of public participation, resolution of assymmetries in knowledge and expertise, and new corporate behaviour driven by the desire for symbolic capital. To demonstrate that such trends are occurring is one overall objective of this interdisciplinary collection. The papers elaborate key phenomena and matters arising from a single case study, and show that new models of governance are emerging, meeting challenges such as those delineated by Benn et al. (2009b) in their call for a synthesis between new political theory and emerging management theory, and for structures and styles consistent with ecological sustainability.

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