SAVE LAKE GEORGE
Did you know Veolia and the NSW Government plan to turn Lake George into a waste site? 40% of Sydney's household rubbish will be transported by train, burned next to Lake George for 30 years, polluting the air, soil, water, and harming residents, livestock and wildlife of the surrounding region.
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What is Veolia proposing?
Veolia proposes to build a waste-to-energy incinerator at their existing Woodlawn Bioreactor landfill site in the Goulburn Mulwaree NSW council region near Tarago.
The incinerator would:
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Burn 380,000 tonnes per year of municipal, commercial, industrial, construction and demolition waste from Sydney containing plastic, metals and types;
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Dispose of toxic residual fly ash leftover from the incineration process at the site;
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Operate 24 hours a day, 365 days per year for a lifespan of 30 years;
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Produce 30MW of power (a coal-fired power plant with equivalent emissions produces 876,000MW of power.
The predicted range of the incinerator's toxic plume
For more information on the predicted plume go to our Plume plotter page.
Join the fight
The more people who register their opposition to the development, the better chance we have that our community will be taken seriously and our concerns actioned. We need you to register your opposition to Veolia's proposal.
How can I help?
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Contact the upcoming NSW government members and put pressure on!
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Contribute money by visiting our Go Fund Me page to help us meet our operational costs and get the word out. All money goes towards fighting the incinerator.
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Fill out our contact form to join our email list to stay updated on the campaign and be notified of important deadlines and timeframes.
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Go to and join our Facebook group. Ask questions and support your community to fight the development.
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Email or write to your local and federal MP letting them know you oppose the incinerator development. Feel free to include some of the information and references available on this site. It's very important to ask that your correspondence also be forwarded to the Minister for an answer to your questions.
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Encourage your neighbours, friends and family to take action.
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Display a sign in your front yard or on your fenceline opposing the proposed incinerator.
Got any questions or ideas? Go to and fill out our contact form. Let's work together to stop this thing!
The NSW Government can easily fix the situation.
The NSW Government can easily recognise the complete lack of social license for this proposal and the damage it would do to the region's health, environment and economy. A quick and easy amendment to existing regulations could see them ban incinerators in the Southern Tablelands in the same way they have been banned in Sydney and across most of the state.
Send members of Goulburn and Monaro electorates emails or Facebook messages.
If you see them out and about, raise it with them in person – push them for more than just a statement of their personal opposition.
Goulburn Electorate:
Wendy Tuckerman (Liberal)
ElectorateOffice.Goulburn@parliament.nsw.gov.au / goulburn@nswliberal.org.au
Monaro Electorate:
Steve Whan (Labor)
steve.whan@nswlabor.org.au
Other Electorates:
And if you live further afield, contact your local member with the same message – that there is no place for an incinerator in Tarago or anywhere in the Southern Tablelands!
AUG 2024 - UPDATE
The fight to stop Veolia's toxic waste incinerator continues.
The fight against Veolia’s proposal to burn Sydney’s waste in the Southern Tablelands is a long way from over. We are currently waiting for Veolia’s response to the resounding 619 objections (98.7% of all submissions) against the proposal during the public exhibition period in December 2022. While we in the community were given only 6 weeks to wade through and respond to the 3,000 of page complicated and technical Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), Veolia and their consultants appear to have as much time as they like to respond to our submissions in order to progress their application with the NSW Department of Planning.
Veolia has announced major amendments to their incinerator proposal
In July 2024, Veolia announced they want to change the way they dispose of air pollution control residue (APCr) – the 15,200 tonnes of highly toxic ‘fly ash’ full of dioxins, furans, PFAS, lead, mercury and arsenic that would be produced every year. Instead of disposing of it in the encapsulation cell Veolia has been telling us for years would provide safety to the local environment, soil and water table, they now want to dump it in the landfill on site using methods they are still “investigating”.
Veolia has struggled to control leachate (contaminated water) at their existing Tarago landfill site in recent years, and the EPA has instructed them to improve their leachate management following several pollution incidences over the past few years. As a result, Veolia needs to build more leachate storage dams (to store millions of megalitres of leachate), and they will no longer have room onsite to build the encapsulation cell where they previously planned to store hazardous waste ash byproducts (APCr / flyash).
Where will they now dump this hazardous waste?
Veolia has stated they now propose to ‘stabilise’ this hazardous material and dump it straight into the existing Woodlawn landfill in Tarago. To add additional concerns, Veolia’s new plans also propose transporting this hazardous material through our towns and alongside our homes and farms to alternative waste disposal sites in Sydney and Queensland when necessary (e.g. when doing facility maintenance), or if the EPA does not approve them to use the landfill as a dump. The Sydney waste facility they propose to use will close within the next decade, so if the incinerator is approved, for a considerable period of its operation hazardous waste material will need to be transported to Queensland!
Are they seriously proposing to transport hazardous material to QLD?!?
Yes, and it just demonstrates the ludicrousy of this incinerator proposal. It’s not a green solution. It creates huge volumes of toxic waste byproduct, the pollution risks of that toxic byproduct need to be managed for decades to come, and to do that they need to transport the waste to another State because there are insufficient NSW waste facilities to manage this hazardous material. You can read more about Veolia’s proposed amendment to the project on the Department of Planning’s Major Projects Portal (amendments dropdown) at: https://www.planningportal.nsw.gov.au/major-projects/projects/woodlawn-advanced-energy-recovery-centre
Environmental risks of the major amendment for hazardous waste management
Veolia’s proposal to change the way they will manage the hazardous waste ash produced by an incinerator heighten the risks for environmental pollution. The waste ash is highly toxic, containing forever chemicals like dioxins and furans, PFAS, and heavy metals such as mercury, cadmium and lead. If the waste ash is dumped into landfill (likely mixed with cement first), this risks the acidic leachate in the landfill eroding any ‘stabilising’ compound the ash is mixed with and releasing the toxic materials into the landfill. That leachate now contaminated with toxic chemicals can then seep into groundwater and into local waterways or be sprayed into the air by Veolia’s leachate evaporators on their leachate evaporation dams.
Veolia has a terrible environmental record at Woodlawn and they have already had a number of EPA penalty notices for pollution offences such as groundwater contamination and improper leachate management. Additionally, as Veolia plans to also transport the waste offsite, there are any number of ways in which this could result in a spill at local towns and farms and into waterways.
This is a company that claims to be an expert in incineration, yet they are still scrambling to find a way to meet safety and environmental conditions set by government.
Veolia has had more than three years to get this proposal right, yet they are now making further changes on the run and claiming they won’t be able to provide the details and respond to the 619 objections lodged against the project until late 2024 or early 2025!
Submission to object to a toxic waste incinerator near Lake George closed on 13/12/22
Read our Communities Against The Tarago Incinerator (CATTI) EIS formal objection
Why are CATTI opposing Veolia's WTE incinerator?
Because scientific research shows waste-to-energy (WTE) incinerators:
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pollute the surrounding air, waterways and land with dangerous toxins such as mercury, lead and persistent environmental pollutants such as dioxins (See source 1);
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pose serious health risks for nearby residents and anyone drinking water from the surrounding water catchment or food produced nearby (See source 2);
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put dangerous toxins into the human food chain (See source 3). Tarago and the surrounding region is a big agricultural producer of lamb, beef, chicken, wine, and other human food and livestock feed;
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contribute to global warming and climate change (See source 4);
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do not form part of a sustainable waste management plan for the future - they are more climate polluting per unit of energy than coal, oil and gas (See source 4) ;
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discourage the 3R's (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) of best-practice, sustainable waste management (See source 5);
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poses a commercial risk to local industry, businesses and livelihoods (especially agriculture) (See source 6);
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in rural areas encourages an "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" approach to the management of Sydney's waste problems (See source 7);
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are inefficient and ineffective energy producers and are not recognised as a sustainable energy resource (See source 8);
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do not form part of the circular economy model that Australia is shifting to (See source 12);
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create highly toxic fly ash that then needs to be transported and stored in containment cells for generations to come (See source 9);
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require a highly sorted and consistent waste stream to manage filtration of particulate emissions (See source 11);
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will increase the already dangerous numbers of trucks on Tarago's narrow and poorly maintained rural roads (See source 11);
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will increase the amount of garbage arriving in Tarago, and intensify odour problems the town experiences from the current Veolia operations (See source 11);
Veolia has misled the Goulburn Mulwaree community about previous developments, cannot manage the odour and emissions from its current operations, and has demonstrated a lack of concern for community wellbeing (See source 10);
NSW Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) fines and interventions have not effectively improved odour and emissions for Tarago and surrounding residents and EPA oversight of a WTE incinerator is likely to be similarly ineffective (See source 10);
We want to provide our much-loved future generations with a healthy life using safe, sustainable and best-practice waste management.
For a more in-depth look at the research on the health, safety and environmental risks of WTE incineration, take a look at our Research page.
For more information on the risks and health impacts of waste-to-energy incineration explore our Frequently Asked Questions page.
Our Aim
What is CATTI aiming to achieve?
We want Veolia to halt plans for an incinerator and focus on improving its current operations so that they no longer adversely affect the town. While residents still need to make regular reports to the EPA about issues with the Woodlawn Precinct operations, Veolia has no social licence to propose further development (See source 10). We want to see a sustainable and future-focussed waste management plan and a community-friendly alternative to a WTE incinerator.
We also want the EPA and NSW Government to deny Veolia's proposal for a waste incinerator at Tarago and thereby acknowledge that the health, homes and livelihoods of rural residents and their children matter just as much the health, homes and livelihoods of people living in Sydney's urban areas.
What is CATTI doing to stop the incinerator project?
We're working with other community organisations, councils and other local areas impacted by the government's WTE Infrastructure Plan to coordinate a community response to Veolia's proposal.
We are:
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providing the community with an open dialogue about the issue;
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providing the community with research, information and the resources to see and understand the risks associated with Veolia's proposed incinerator;
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providing a supportive place for people to ask questions about the development;
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encouraging the community to make their concerns known;
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helping the community formulate an effective and coordinated opposition to the development;
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providing resources and advice to help the community take action to oppose the development;
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supporting other communities also opposing WTE incinerator proposals and planning.
Read our newsletter!
Go to our newsletter page to see 'The Tarago Toxic Burner' - the best way to stay up to date with what's happening in our fight to save our community from Veolia's Toxic 'Waste-to-Energy' incinerator.