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Total Environment Centre (TEC) today welcomed the Land and Environment Court’s rejection of Orange City Council’s unsustainable plans for the Hub landfill at Molong in NSW’s Central West.

The judgment serves as a warning for all NSW Councils that sustainability and resource recovery must be the priority over plans to dump more waste.

“The ruling against Orange City Council’s unsustainable rubbish dump has raised the bar for all NSW councils,” said Jane Castle, TEC’s Waste Campaigner.

“The message is loud and clear: councils must put sustainability first, not last. Meeting NSW’s targets to increase recycling from the municipal sector from 26% to 66% by 2014 is not an optional extra.”

“Orange City Council’s key mistake was to rush ahead with the landfill, making recycling merely a second thought.

The urgency for recycling would have disappeared once the landfill was built because landfill is artificially cheap.”

The ruling backs TEC calls in 2006 for Orange City Council to go back to the drawing board to prioritise the reprocessing facility ahead of the landfill. Failure to include the resource reprocessing facility was one of the four key reasons Judge Preston rejected the plan.

As Judge Preston said: ‘Without the resource reprocessing facility, the proposed development is unsustainable and unacceptable.’

“The NSW Government should also be chastened by this decision. Leaving the achievement of NSW’s waste targets should not be left to the discretion of councils or the Department of Planning tinkering with fundamentally flawed development applications. The NSW Government needs to get serious about reducing waste and increasing resource recovery.”