Action is pending on a 1983–1984 state government report that recommended purchasing houses close to the eastern border of the Botany Industrial Park where residents risked death from major industrial incidents. A higher number of residents remain at risk of a potential serious toxic gas leak. Botany locals share their neighbourhood with a lot of industrial and commercial activities, schools and hospitals located close to Sydney’s international airport, and Sydney’s main Port Botany — exposing a broader number of people, facilities and areas to the risks the Orica storage plant. Indeed, according to Davies (2014), Orica's chloro-alkali plant in the Botany Industrial Park has contaminated the Botany Bay aquifer to such an extent that bore water use is prohibited around 20km north (2).

The Australian government's proposals to deal with the waste via a centralised high-temperature incinerator were abandoned in the early 1990s just as Australia ratified a Basel Convention prohibiting its export. Subsequently, in 2001, Orica proposed developing a facility on site (in the park) to treat the HCB, which led to a massive local campaign showing deep suspicions of the company’s activities in the past and future scarcely tempered by Orica’s offer of $5000 for the community to receive ‘independent’ expert advice and its refusal to divulge company data (3).

With its low incomes and around half of the residents of the local area only speaking English as a second language, Lloyd-Smith and Bell (2003) refer to the Botany case as a ‘sacrifice zone’ of clear environmental injustice — such facilities are most likely to be adjacent to the homes of relatively disadvantaged groups and they are least equipped, knowledgeable and skilful, and have less time and other resources to fight environmental campaigns against well-organised private and government agencies. Yet opposition has managed to yield only poor proposals to deal with the waste (2).

In July 2014 France became the third state to refuse using Europe’s high temperature incinerators to deal with Orica’s HCB after German, Danish and French environmentalists protested in 2014 as the Orica-sponsored Australian Tour de France cycling team raced over the French Alps (4). Australian environmentalists — Doctors for the Environment Australia, Friends of the Earth (Australia), the Nature Conservation Council, National Toxics Network, Greenpeace Australia, International POPs Elimination Network, and Basel Action Network (Global Alliance for Incineration Alternatives) also objected, pointing to Australia’s international legal obligation to destroy its own toxic waste (5).

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