Industrial quantities of rubbish are “escaping” Ravenhall’s Boral landfill multiple times a year, according to a community action group.
Eyal Cohen, of the Boral community liaison committee, said there had been at least 12 major incidents since March 2013, including most recently on June 24, when wild weather caused rubbish to be blown from the eastern boundary of the landfill site.
Boral took full responsibility in that instance and self-reported the incident to Melton council and the Environment Protection Authority.
Mr Cohen said he was surprised that Boral had yet to invest in a windproof transfer station.
“Boral seems to be happy to be losing a portion of the rubbish that people are paying them to put a lid on every time the wind picks up,” he said. “They go out and collect some of it … but of course, they don’t go into other people’s land to pick it up. It’s a fiasco.
“It’s industrial quantities of rubbish spread out across kilometres.”
Boral waste solutions general manager Richard McCarthy said the company was minimising its impact on the local community and had installed high fences, employed a team of on-site litter collectors and proactively managed and reduced litter escape.
“These measures include progressive compaction of the tip face to reduce [escaped litter], mobile litter nets positioned around the open tip face, and completely covering the tip face at the end of each day.
“On high-risk days similar to that last month when the site had wind of about 100km/h, we’ve supplemented these standard containment measures with additional precautionary steps.
“If a major litter escape occurs [as happened last month and August 2013], we notify any impacted neighbours and the EPA.
“We then deploy our litter collection crew and specialised machinery to quickly clean up.”
