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GREATER WESTERN ’S HOT ISSUE

DECEMBER 2019 DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD

A FEW MONTHS AGO Sydney was witness to a sobering sight: our children in our streets, on strike from school to protest ’s failure to take action on our changing climate. They chanted and sang and made passionate speeches, with the timeless optimism of the young. Like all protest movements they carried signs, and among many memorable one-liners was this one, held aloft by a young girl:

If you did your job we WOULD be in school.

These words speak directly to what this paper is about.

At the Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue we don’t pretend to be experts on the complex questions of , nor do we claim to have all the answers. We understand deeply the divisive nature of the debate.

But as a multi-stakeholder community engagement forum with a focus on (GWS), our job is to try to beyond it, to a more co- operative place where practical solutions can be found.

Climate change is just a set of practical problems, but for those in GWS, they are now urgent ones. effect in the ’s dense , and bushlands on the outer fringes, means that few Sydneysiders will be harder hit by rising temperatures and fiercer fires. This may be our most challenging ever. GWS must lead in changing our basic utilities of life, such as how we manage our water, energy and waste, to make them more sustainable.

Our kids have reminded us that the time for divided inaction has passed. We need practical ideas and coherent strategies that all , regardless of our views, can get behind. The recommendations in WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE are our suggestions for what some might look like, and our best shot at responding — like grown-ups — to that young girl’s optimistic plea.

Finally, I would like to thank the Dialogue team for all their work researching and producing this paper, and in particular Jack Robertson who has driven this important contribution to the ongoing discussion on the impact of climate change on our region.

ADAM LETO EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR WESTERN SYDNEY LEADERSHIP DIALOGUE [email protected]

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 CONTENTS

Executive Summary 04

Beyond the climate change wars 09 A whole-of-community working 13 Greater Western Sydney’s risk factors 14 Heat in Greater Western Sydney 15 Water in Greater Western Sydney 17 Waste in Greater Western Sydney 21 Linear to circular utilities 27 Utilities’ challenges and opportunities 28

Recommendations 30 Putting the water market to work 31 Expanding waste stewardship 36 LGA greening and cooling 43 Demand managing our energy 49 Inventing the green utilities future 54

References 59

3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 THE WORSENING , record low dam levels and early start to the bushfire season have confirmed the need for practical action in response to rising temperatures and increasingly volatile weather patterns. The shift in public perceptions already underway is accelerating. Overwhelmingly, Australians now want to stop arguing about climate change and take steps to mitigate its worsening impact.

That impact is felt more intensely in Greater Western Sydney (GWS) than in other parts of Sydney, and for people living in the region it is a day-to-day reality, not a far-off problem for future generations and future governments to solve.

A transforming built environment, fewer green spaces and natural waterways, more concentrated traffic pollution and a lack of creates an Urban Heat Island effect which can lead to temperatures in GWS 10 to 15 degrees above those in Sydney’s east. As climate change progresses, its impact on health, productivity and amenity will be felt first and most ferociously by those living in the region. For this reason, climate change is Western Sydney’s Hot Issue and the Dialogue believes a focus on our utilities is the best way to circumvent the raucous and unproductive policy debate around national or global solutions.

Notwithstanding the now infamous intransigence at the policy and political level and the need for a collaborative community effort, our recommendations call strongly on government to lead. While the community’s expectations for big sweeping policy solutions are tragically low, it is not unreasonable to ask for practical solutions to the here-and-now side-effects of climate change, and to question the fairness of the community bearing the burden of policy failures past – we deserve better than to have to accept load shedding in our energy grid whenever there is a heatwave, for example.

In the utilities space, there are a myriad of small actions that can add up to a giant leap in addressing the Hot Issue.

HEAT, WATER AND WASTE IN GWS

Since 1965 the mean maximum temperature in GWS has increased over twice as much as it has in the rest of Sydney, and the number of January days over 35 degrees has grown times more. Sydney’s water usage and leakage rates are high, and our water recycling rate is low in comparison to other major Australian cities and many overseas jurisdictions. Following changes to recycling export markets and with population growth and infrastructure activity continuing apace, Sydney’s excessive per capita waste generation, modest recycling performance and virtually non-existent waste-to-energy recovery capacity now also demands a complete rethink.

5 UTILITY TRANSITION AND GREATER WESTERN SYDNEY

This city is getting hotter, squandering too much water and producing too much waste. The extra urgency of these converging ‘basic provisions’ factors in GWS, combined with ambitious projected growth rates and ageing existing utilities infrastructure, now demand the region to take the lead in calling for disruptive but coherent strategic change to our utilities networks: how we provide ourselves with food and water, shelter and sanitation, energy and communications.

The necessary transition will be away from the existing Linear Economy utility networks, of centralised large- scale generation, one-way distribution, and inefficient single-use consumption, towards Circular Economy models. In this more environmentally sustainable approach, the currently ‘siloed’ utilities functions, feedstocks and outputs will become progressively integrated and coordinated, minimising waste and carbon footprint and maximising consumption efficiencies. The transition will be complex, expensive and multigenerational, with much of the operational detail necessarily refined ‘as we go’. It will demand an epic collective effort in practical problem-solving, one we need to start now. With this in mind, the Dialogue recommends five immediate bold policy steps, to kickstart a whole-of-community utilities transition ‘working bee’ – or at least to focus discussion beyond the ‘climate change wars’.

OUR RECOMMENDATIONS ARE GUIDED BY FIVE TRANSITIONAL PRINCIPLES:

1. Political and public service leadership will be vital. 2. Whole-of-community participation, however, is what will make or break successful transition. 3. Expertise must prevail — as must our individual agency for collective change. 4. Cooperative goodwill between the commercial and not-for-profit sectors is critical. 5. No-one gets left behind in this utilities transition.

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 RECOMMENDATIONS

PUTTING THE We recommend that a twinned target of 100 Gigalitres/20% of recycled water in Sydney’s water use ‘budget’ by 2030 be set as a standing Premier’s Priority. Last MARKET TO year Sydney consumed a massive 210 litres per day per resident, which is much WORK: A HARD more than most Australians. Most of this we used only once and then flushed RECYCLING wastefully out to sea. Meanwhile recycled water represented less than seven TARGET percent of our total consumption, lagging far behind national and world’s best practice.

Reusing drinking water for other purposes doesn’t just ease our dependence on unpredictable rainfall, it also retains our most powerful ‘cooling and greening’ tool in our local communities, helping keep temperatures down in our suburbs. Our poor water recycling performance is largely the result of an inefficient water sector framework, in which neither the supplier, Sydney Water, nor the many private sector specialists can fully deploy their world-class expertise. A recycling ‘hard target’ is the strategic spur that will drive a long-overdue recalibration, and put Sydney’s water market properly to work. EXPANDING1 We recommend a whole-of-community ‘stewardship of waste’ pilot project to WASTE reduce our use of non-recyclable takeaway coffee cups. We call on the NSW STEWARDSHIP: Government to lead it by committing to avoid these problem-waste items in all SOLVING OUR procurement, and the rest of us to join in by choosing reusable or compostable TAKEAWAY options, too. Expanding waste stewardship, which prices the full cost of COFFEE PROBLEM consumption into our purchases, is the key to maintaining our high standard of living while reducing its current unsustainable waste byproducts. LGA2 GREENING We recommend that our local Councils’ individual capacity to lead the fight AND COOLING: against Western Sydney’s Hot Issue in their own communities be enhanced, EQUIPPING where necessary by sharpening, streamlining and devolving to them the planning OUR COUNCILS authority and tools that determine how their built environments evolve. No-one is FOR THE FIGHT better placed to keep their own suburbs cool and sustainable than those who live, AGAINST URBAN work and govern in them. Sydney’s planning framework must recognise this, and HEAT facilitate their doing so. MANAGING3 We recommend that the NSW government lead in a whole-of-community easing of ENERGY DEMAND: our dependence on excessive air-conditioning, by adopting a minimum thermostat WEANING setting of 25 degrees in government premises — and inviting us to do the same. OURSELVES OFF Abundant electricity has eroded our capacity for energy self-discipline, nowhere UNSUSTAINABLE more so than with our emissions-intensive air-con. This is now a critical grid AIR-CONDITIONING overload issue in our worsening . We all need to moderate – only slightly – our ‘need’ to live in fridges.

INVENTING4 OUR Finally, we recommend that a strategic ‘green utilities’ precinct be established SUSTAINABLE in the existing light industrial zone of Camellia. Our utilities transition will need FUTURE: A ‘GREEN a dedicated strategic hub for the coordinated development of integrated green UTILITIES’ R&D technologies, new green research and skills, and recalibrated investment PRECINCT FOR and project delivery models. Camellia, integrated within, but sensitively delineated CAMELLIA from, precisely the kind of dense urban infill areas that our utilities transition will ultimately benefit the most, fits the bill well. 5 7 WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 BEYOND THE CLIMATE CHANGE WARS

9 THE WESTERN ARGUING about Climate Change is now pointless. The only people still doing so are those of us who aren’t Climate Change experts. So SYDNEY whether we’re right or wrong, we’re just blowing more hot air into the LEADERSHIP atmosphere. DIALOGUE DOESN’T CARE WHETHER OR Which is the last thing it needs. NOT YOU ‘BELIEVE’ Our experts stopped arguing about it long ago. The global community of climate scientists, field researchers, technicians, data analysts and IN CLIMATE modellers, along with every peak body on the planet, has been CHANGE in broad consensus about the threat of Climate Change for decades. Lately they’ve been joined by a growing international network of policy negotiators, investment and insurance risk strategists, not-for-profit advocates and, of course, billions of ordinary people all over the planet, who simply want to safeguard their children’s future.

That‘s just the adults. We all know what our kids have had to say about it lately.

It doesn’t matter now that we’ve taken longer than we should have to recognise the danger we’re putting ourselves in. It doesn’t matter now who was right and who was wrong yesterday. All that matters now is what we do today and tomorrow. Thankfully, more and more of us are agreeing with those who actually know what they’re talking about: our climate experts.

The latest surveys indicate that a clear and growing majority of WE’RE SIMPLY Australians are now deeply worried about Climate Change, and want URGING EVERYONE our community to listen to what they are telling us we need to do to stay TO DO THEIR BIT, safe. 1 IN A COLLECTIVE This is as it should be in any rational, democratic community, whether COMMUNITY the problem we’re worried about is a bushfire approaching the edge of town, an outbreak of measles in our daycare centres, or the structural EFFORT TO cracks that suddenly appear in our high rise investment property. When CHANGE THE in doubt? Call in the experts. Listen to their expert advice. Act on it.

WAY WE PROVIDE It’s hard to argue with that approach to community problem-solving. So OURSELVES WITH let’s not. Not any more. Not for any longer. LIFE’S BASICS — WITHOUT LOSING There’s a lot to do. And not a lot of time to do it. ANY OF ITS QUALITY The best place to start? With the basic practicalities of life.

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 “WE CULTIVATED OUR LAND, JUST ANOTHER UTILITIES UPGRADE, IN A BUT IN A WAY DIFFERENT 60,000+ YEAR ROLLING RENOVATION FROM THE WHITE MAN. WE The women and men who provide us with the basic needs of living – our food and water, our shelter and ENDEAVOURED TO LIVE WITH sanitation, our energy and communications – are THE LAND; THEY SEEMED TO the best at what they do in the world. They’ve had to be. is as harsh an environment as any on LIVE OFF IT. I WAS TAUGHT the planet. The magnificent living standards they’ve TO PRESERVE, NEVER TO helped create in our country are testament to their DESTROY.” ingenuity and hard work. Indigenous Elder2 But it’s wrong to presume that by ‘utilities’ we mean only the systems and methods we late arrivals brought with us, and have refined continuously since. Wrong – and a colossal missed opportunity to emulate the truly time-proven experts at living efficiently in our tricky, unforgiving geography. As successful as our modern solutions have been over the last few centuries, they’ve also engineered “WHAT IS UNDERWAY IS some serious problems we will now have to rebuild ourselves beyond. Business as usual just won’t cut it A TRANSITION TO A LOW- any longer. CARBON FUTURE. THAT There’s much to learn from the masters of Australian DIRECTION IS IRREVERSIBLE sustainable living. Sixty thousand years’ worth, and AND THE SMART MONEY still counting. HAS WORKED THAT OUT AND CAN SEE GLOBALLY THE TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF INFRASTRUCTURE REQUIRED…” Geoffrey Summerhayes3 Australian Prudential Regulation Authority & Sustainable Insurance Forum

11 “NO ONE IS TOO WHATEVER OUR SIZE, WE ALL HAVE TO PULL OUR WEIGHT SMALL TO MAKE A Everyone has to pitch in and we need to get cracking. To develop and DIFFERENCE” take even more of the strategic and practical courses of action than Greta Thunberg4 many of us already are. It’s not going to be easy to move beyond divisive public arguments and contested symbolic gesturing, because the contradictions and complexities involved in changing our day-to-day systems of living can often feel intimidating, even overwhelming. No solution is a magic bullet. There is no cure-all medicine. Every useful option we have has its downsides and its drawbacks — and its losers. This means that every practical suggestion anyone makes will have its critics. Often their criticisms will be fierce – and entirely valid. It will be tempting to fall into the oldest trap there is for public policy makers. But: Allowing ‘the perfect to become the enemy of the good’ will “YES, THERE IS mean continuing utilities transition paralysis – and Climate URGENCY, BUT Change suicide. WE STILL HAVE We don’t have to solve every problem at once. No single solution needs AGENCY.” to be perfect. Let’s just roll up our sleeves and get on with the jobs, big 5 Michael E. Mann , US Climate or little, that each of us is able to do in a whole-of-community utilities Change expert transition “working bee”.

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 A WHOLE-OF-COMMUNITY WORKING BEE

POLITICAL AND BUT OUR EXPERTISE MUST COMMERCIAL AND PUBLIC SERVICE COLLECTIVE PREVAIL ANEW NOT-FOR-PROFIT LEADERSHIP RESPONSE IS KEY COOPERATION IS MATTERS VITAL

To make disruptive It’s not really how This shouldn’t need Both the commercial and changes, someone our leaders lead that saying but we live in odd NFP advocacy sectors needs to go first. It will matter in this times, in which certain will need to bring to needn’t always be our transformation. It’s kinds of expertise bear their unique and politicians and public whether the rest of arouses suspicion, if equally critical strengths. servants, but the us follow, or not. Our not hostility. It’s obvious To transform how our complexity of utilities recommendations we must heed our community provisions transition demands maximise the sharing utilities experts to get all its individuals’ basic it in this case. Only around of the hardest this transition right, but needs, we require both those with oversight work of utilities a return of respect for tool-sets – and a tonne of all parts of our civic transition. specialised excellence of co-operative goodwill. machinery can hope to needs to extend far integrate the often- A key is going to beyond that in water, The powerful levers of competing imperatives be changing our energy, waste and a vibrant marketplace: of the sector’s multiple individual lifestyles and communications. competition, risk-taking stakeholders. In any consumption habits just innovation, consumer case, leaders are a little bit each, adding A renewed compact of choice, positive supposed to lead, right? up to a seismic shift at mutual trust and shared price signals for new the community level. obligation between our green utilities, and Our recommendations community and our disincentives for old, hone in on challenging So when our politicians media, academic and unsustainable ones. them to seize the most do lead us by example, policy leaders is also Above all, the collective powerful leadership of instead of mocking and crucial to this challenge. buy-in to this transition all: leading by example. opposing them, why not We must re-embrace our must incorporate a get behind them? We own agency and capacity mutual obligation to elect them, after all. for elite achievement. safeguard the common public good, and ensure that no one is left behind.

NO ONE GETS LEFT BEHIND

13 GREATER WESTERN SYDNEY’S RISK FACTORS

There are many urgent reasons why Sydney’s West will lead the way in our whole-of-community transition to more sustainable utilities:

AMBITIOUS EXISTING UTILITIES URBAN HEAT A TIMELY GROWTH TARGETS INFRASTRUCTURE ISLAND EFFECT OPPORTUNITY FOR AND MODELS BECOMING A BOLD LEADERSHIP UNDER PRESSURE CRITICAL HEALTH RISK

Over the next twenty Meanwhile, much of the The West needs all For our politicians and years, Greater Western existing infrastructure the local cooling and our business leaders, the Sydney (GWS) will in the Sydney’s dense greening it can get. easiest utilities strategy become home to another middle ring is already However quickly the rest of all will be to change 1.5 million people. under stress and some of Sydney is set to heat nothing, remaining That’s a lot of new water, is nearing its end-of-life. up, the searing impact of politically ‘safe’ and energy and waste needs, Especially our ocean heat-absorbing buildings commercially reactive by with the distances outfall feeder networks, and roads, fewer green assuring everyone that involved – for pipes, via which we squander open spaces, heavy what we’ve done in the grids, waste trucks – a whole Sydney Harbour pollution and no sea past will go on working always lengthening. of perfectly good water breezes will always in the future. Until the ‘Business as usual’ each year. Rather than ensure that the west utilities crisis hits, when (BAU) simply won’t cut it. paying a fortune to keep gets hotter, faster, and voters and shareholders pumping that abundant for longer. This is no will invariably demand resource uselessly out to longer just a matter of action. sea, let’s keep its cooling comfort or productivity. and greening qualities In the West, Urban Heat close to home. Island (UHI) effect is now literally a life-or-death issue.

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 HEAT IN GREATER WESTERN SYDNEY

This paper is called Western Sydney’s Hot Issue for good reason. We know the world has been warming for at least half a century6. GWS’s higher risk factors mean that those living here have felt it much more than most Sydneysiders. Temperature trends well-documented by the record, with a sweat-inducing absence of ambiguity, the disproportionately high rate of increase in GWS7:

PartsParts of of Western Western Sydney, Sydney, such such as as Richmond, Richmond, will will experience experience even even more more extre extrememe heat heat days:...anddays: up anup to alarminglyto 67 67 per per year yeariniquitousParts by by 2090. 2090.of increaseWestern CSIRO CSIRO andin Sydney, and the the thetotal Bureau such Bureau number as of Richmond,of Meteorologyof Meteorology days per will year (BoM)experience (BoM) over project35°C project even more extreme heat thatthat across across Western Western Sydney Sydneydays: betweenup between to 67 pera aquarter quarteryear by and 2090.and a athird CSIROthird of of summerand summer the Bureaudays days will will of be Meteorology be over over (BoM) project Parts of Western Sydney, such as Richmond, will experience even more extreme heat 3535 degrees degrees by by 20 20909.0 . that across Western Sydney between a quarter and a third of summer days will be over days: up to 67 per year by 2090. CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) project 35 degrees by 2090. thatTheThe dataacross data also alsoWestern predicts predicts Sydney large large increasesbetween increases ain quarterin days days over overand 40 a40 degrees,third degrees, of summer from from Western Western days will Sydney’s Sydney’s be over 35historicalhistorical degrees average averageby 209 of0 .of 1 1dayThe day overdata over 40also 40 degrees degreespredicts per perlarge year year increases up up to to 12 12 indays daysdays over overover 40 4040 degrees degreesdegrees, per per from Western Sydney’s yearyear by by 2090. 2090. Some Some parts partshistorical of of Western Western average Sydney Sydney of 1 willday will experienceover experience 40 degrees even even permore more year extreme extreme up to 12heat heat days over 40 degrees per The data also predicts large increases in days over 40 degrees, from Western Sydney’s days,days, including including Richmond Richmondyear with bywith 2090.up up to to 17Some 17 days days parts per per ofyear year Western over over 40 Sydney40 degrees degrees will by byexperience 2090. 2090. even more extreme heat historical average of 1 day over 40 degrees per year up to 12 days over 40 degrees per days, including Richmond with up to 17 days per year over 40 degrees by 2090. ClimateyearClimate by 2090.change change Some will will notparts not affect affectof Western everyone everyone Sydney equally. equally. will People experience People in in Western Western even more Sydney Sydney extreme will will endure endureheat days, including Richmond with up to 17 days per year over 40 degrees by 2090. moremore hot hot days days than than people peopleClimate in in other change other parts parts will of notGreening of the the affect state, Australia,state, everyone as as shownbased shown on equally. inBurea in Figure Figure of MeteorologyPeople 2 2below: below: in data Western Sydney will endure more hot days than people in other parts of the state, as shown in Figure 2 below: FigureClimateTheseFigure 2 numbers:change2 D: aysDays over will over won’t not35 35 degrees surpriseaffect degrees everyone in anyone in selected selected equally.living locations locations with People the (current impact(current in Western policiesof policies UHI Sydney effect scenario) scenario) inwill GWS. endure Modelling by the Australia Institute’s Western Sydney Heatwatch8 shows that the more hot days than peopleFigure in 2other: Days parts over of 35 the degrees state, asin selectedshown in locations Figure 2 below:(current policies scenario) trends will accelerate if weHistoricalHistorical continue2030 2030utilities20502050 BAU.2070 2070 20902090 Figure 2: Days over 35 degrees in selected locations (current policies scenario) Historical 2030 2050 2070 2090 7070 6767 5959 67 6060 70Historical 2030 2050 2070 2090 5252 4848 59 705050 67 60 4343 4343 52 59 48 3737 3737 604040 50 43 3333 52 43 2929 3030 37 37 3030 48 40 2626 50 2525 33 2424 43 2222 43 30 2222 1818 29 1919 2020 30 25 37 1616 37 1616 26 40 1515 1515 24 22 33 1313 1111 22 1212 29 8 8 30 18 19 9 9 1010 20 15 7 7 15 7 7 16 16 30 25 24 13 26 4 4 12 22 11 22 9 Days per year over 35 degrees over per year Days 18 19 8 7 7 200 0 15 10 15 16 16 4 13 12 RichmondRichmond PenrithPenrith 11CamdenCamden ParramattaParramatta BankstownBankstown CoogeeCoogee9 0 8 7 7 10 4 Richmond Penrith Camden ParramattaEasternEastern Coogee 0 GoingGoing West West SuburbsSuburbs Richmond Penrith Camden Bankstown Coogee Eastern Going West 15 Source:Source: CSIRO CSIRO and and Bureau Bureau of ofMeteorology Meteorology (2018) (2018) Climate Climate projections projections, provided, provided on on request request Suburbs Eastern Source:Going CSIRO West and Bureau of Meteorology (2018) ClimateSuburbs projections, provided on request ExtremeExtreme heat heat events events also also present present a arisk risk to to critical critical infrastructure infrastructure including including road, road, rail rail and and electricityelectricitySource: generation. generation. CSIRO and InBureauExtreme In the the denselyof densely Meteorologyheat eventsurbanised urbanised (2018) also environment presentClimate environment projections a risk of toof Western, criticalWesternprovided infrastructureSydney, on Sydney, request including road, rail and powerpower failure failure alone alone can canelectricity lead lead to to serious generation.serious health health In risks therisks withdensely with many many urbanised homes homes and environment and workplaces workplaces of Western Sydney, Extreme heat events also present a risk to critical infrastructure including road, rail and reliantreliant on on air air-conditioning-conditioningpower to to maintainfailure maintain alone safe safe cantemperatures. temperatures. lead to serious Extreme Extreme health temperatures temperaturesrisks with many also also homes and workplaces electricity generation. In the densely urbanised environment of Western Sydney, posepose a arisk risk to to the the health healthreliant and and safety on safety air of-conditioning of workers workers in in manyto many maintain industries industries safe andtemperatures. and has has a amajor major Extreme temperatures also power failure alone can lead to serious health risks with many homes and workplaces impactimpact on on productivity productivity poseand and economic a economic risk to the activity. activity. health and safety of workers in many industries and has a major reliant on air-conditioning to maintain safe temperatures. Extreme temperatures also impact on productivity and economic activity. FortunatelyposeFortunately a risk to, if ,the ifemissions emissions health andare are reducedsafety reduced of theworkers the rises rises in in extrememany extreme industries heat heat days days and will willhas be bea farmajor far lower. lower. impactAsAs shown shown on inproductivity in Figure Figure 1 1above Fortunatelyaboveand ,economic with, with a, adecisiveif decisive emissionsactivity. reduction r eduction are reduced in in emissions emissions the rises the the in number extremenumber of heatof 35 35 days will be far lower. degreedegree days days could could be be keptAs kept shown to to 19 19 daysin days Figure per per year1 year above by by 2090,, with2090, arounda arounddecisive a athird rthirdeduction as as many many in emissionsdays days as as the number of 35 Fortunately, if emissions are reduced the rises in extreme heat days will be far lower. areare expected expected under under a abusinessdegree business days-as-as-usual -couldusual scenario. bescenario. kept to 19 days per year by 2090, around a third as many days as As shown in Figure 1 above, with a decisive reduction in emissions the number of 35 are expected under a business-as-usual scenario. degree days could be kept to 19 days per year by 2090, around a third as many days as are expected under a business-as-usual scenario. HeatWatchHeatWatch – –Western Western Sydney Sydney 4 4 HeatWatch – Western Sydney 4 HeatWatch – Western Sydney 4 WHAT WILL BE THE IMPACT OF HOTTER DAYS — AND MANY MORE OF THEM?

Health: Studies suggest that unmitigated UHI effect can increase heat-related deaths in GWS to as many as 14 per 100,000 people, compared to a coastal average of 59.

Productivity: Lost productivity due to extreme heat in Australia in 2013-14 was estimated at costing $6.9 billon10. Southeast Australia’s 2009 heatwave blackouts cost its economy $800m and overall caused 874 deaths11.

Infrastructure: Hotter temperatures increase stresses on water pipes and pumps, roads and , power lines, substations and transformers. GWS’s electricity demand doubles with a temperature rise from 20 to 40’C12.

Amenity: The hotter it gets, the harder and unhappier life becomes for everyone.

WHAT DO WE NEED TO DO ON HEAT? To keep our suburbs cooler we’ll need to:

Green our local A powerful coolant of urban communities is ‘green infrastructure’. An abundance communities of trees, shrubs, roof gardens, , grass and surfaces brings with it shade, rainfall and moisture retention, heat reflection and pollution-absorbing photosynthesis.

Water our local More local green infrastructure needs more local ‘blue infrastructure’. Not simply communities irrigation of parks and rejuvenation of rivers, but fully integrated Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD). Natural watercourses and catchments, urban ponds, pools and canals all directly mitigate UHI effect through enhanced convective and evaporative cooling.

Plan for natural WSUD should be aligned with built design at all scales that maximises other urban cooling natural heat mitigation strategies: airflow, orientation, size and architectural shade, cooling surface, material and colour choices, window and door designs, and internal watering.

And, of course, On the larger, collective scale, everything and anything at our local community reduce GHG level – big or small – that reduces the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that are emissions warming the planet will ultimately help put the brake on the temperature in our back yards, too. Think global, act local on emissions!

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 WATER IN GREATER WESTERN SYDNEY

The first and most important thing we need to do to cool down is some hard looking at — and thinking about – how we supply ourselves with water and how we could do it a whole lot smarter.

The current terrible drought is heart-breaking for all Australians, especially those directly impacted. But it’s also a red herring when it comes to improving how coastal city dwellers manage water resources. We must grasp that the important question when it comes to provisioning our water sustainably is not ‘How much do we have?’ It’s ‘how cleverly do we use what we have?’

On the first question, Sydneysiders have always been lucky. We live in a river-fed basin surrounded by friendly hills which offer ample natural water catchments, convenient dam sites and powerful gravity-pumping. Even in , our region’s rainfall is relatively reliable. While , the source of 80% of our potable water, is low right now13, it’s still holding about a trillion litres, around two years’ worth if we’re frugal. Given the plight of others we’d be gracious to see it as half-full rather than half-empty. Especially since the Sydney Plant can top up our supply with 250 million litres daily from the . That capacity may soon double, meaning that regardless of rainfall it alone could supply a third of our daily needs14.

Compared to the rest of Australia, Sydney is not ‘suffering’ from drought. And we probably never will be. All the more reason to take an honest look at the questions that really matter. HOW MUCH WATER DO WE WASTE?

Even compared only to other east coast city – a lot. It’s not really our fault, and as our adherence to restrictions in the last major drought proved, we can be as self-disciplined with water as any Australian. We’ll examine why (and how to change it) later, but the awkward fact is that on water efficiency, Sydney is currently under-performing.

17

Our performance and five-year plan

2.1 Water use in 2017-18

2017-18

Total water use (potable water and unfiltered water)4, including 599,885 million litres (or 600 GL) • Residential sector 65% • Non-residential sector (industrial, commercial and 24% government properties) • Non-revenue water including leaks 11% (including 9% from leakage)

Observed average water use per person 324 litres a day (or 118 kL a year)

Weather corrected average per person water demand 306 litres a day (or 112 kL a year) Historical Demand in Sydney

Population (million)* Water Demand (GL/yr)^ Demand corrected for weather 700 5.5 Water Water Restrictions Water Wise Rules Restrictions

650 5.0

600 4.5

550

4.0

500 (million) Population Water Demand (GL/yr) Demand Water

3.5 450

400 3.0 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

Financial Year Ending June * estimated ^ not corrected for weather

Figure 2-1 Despite a 25% increase in population the total demand for drinking water remains lower Sydneythan itWater did before figures mandatory show restrictions we can were slash introduced usage in late rates 2003 . Itwhen is estimated we try. that Further,the hotter the rise drierin demand weather in 2017from-18 2012 resulted mostly in a 33 GL reflects increase inpopulation demand compared not toper what capita would begrowth. Nonetheless,expected in a ouryear withconsumption average weather is conditions.still too high compared to and 15 . 4 Sectoral splits are estimated based on available consumption data for period April 2017 to March 2018.

Water use by metropolitan jurisdiction Residential litres per capita per day Water Conservation Report | 2017-2018 Page | 5 Sydney 210 Melbourne 161 (target of 155) Brisbane/Gold Coast 169 Water cost and pricing Residential, per 1000 litres Sydney $2.28, flat rate, public monopoly Melbourne $2.64 - $4.62 (volume scale), (example Yarra Valley Water) competition Brisbane/Gold Coast $2.915, public wholesale supplier Figures: 15 16 17 18 19

Sydney Water Corporation Million litres per day leakage losses15 2014-15 99 2015-16 103 2016-17 114 2017-18 129.5 = over 25L per day per capita!

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 WATER RECYCLING: HOW DO WE RATE? THE “RIGHT WATER FOR THE RIGHT JOB” One word: embarrassingly. Especially as the biggest Water recycling is a discussion we can’t avoid, city in the driest ! however awkward. Deemed too delicate and divisive, to date merely raising the issue can send some of Last year Sydney recycled only 6.7% of our total water us jumping to conclude we’ll be forced to drink our provisioning budget20, with most of the rest flushed own sewerage. What is needed is a more nuanced out to sea. discussion about water’s true worth, as a precious and endlessly re-usable resource to be carefully Internationally, Israel leads the world, recycling about husbanded. 90% of its ‘used’ water21. Cyprus (90% of wastewater reused for irrigation)22 sets the pace for a The banal fact is that we’re awash in ‘recycled’ rapidly if belatedly recalibrating its aspirations, with water already. Sydney’s Desalination Plant pumps Spain already managing 20%23. Other middle-eastern 250 million litres into our taps daily (saltwater and countries, such as Kuwait (35%)24, have long reused wastewater processing is essentially the same). Last water well. Closer to home, ’s ‘NEWater’ year St Marys Recycling Plant added 10.5 billion now meets approximately 40% of its needs, too25. litres to the .30 It already keeps many Even in the USA, for years, about 10% of municipal parks, ovals and golf courses green and lush, and wastewater has been recycled or reused26. those few of us with dual water systems on tap have the luxury of ‘purple pipes’, for keeping their gardens Here at home, has increased its wastewater alive and their cars clean, without any drought-time reuse by 70% over the last decade, and is aiming guilt. Meanwhile industrial users, such as those for 45% recycling by 203027. at 31%28 and supplied by the Rosehill Recycled Water Scheme, Melbourne (9.5%)29 are both ahead of us, while on have come to regard their recycled feedstock as small scales some rural town recycling arrangements far superior to regular tap water, offering many stack up with the world’s best. commercial advantages.

So, it’s not that we can’t do it. In fact, Australians While nomenclature is important, we can’t get stuck developed much of the world’s best-practice water on whether we refer to ‘recycled’ water, ‘premium’ recycling technology. water or ‘new’ water, when what we really mean is the right water for the right job.

EACH YEAR WE PUMP TEN PROSPECT RESERVOIRS OF DRINKING WATER DOWN FROM THE HILLS, THEN MILES OUT TO SEA…BARELY USING IT ON THE WAY THROUGH OUR SWELTERING CONCRETE JUNGLE.

19 WHAT DO WE NEED TO DO ON WATER?

REDUCE PER USE THE RIGHT REDUCE OUR RATE KEEP AS MUCH CAPITA POTABLE WATER FOR THE OF LEAKAGE LOSS WATER AS CLOSE TO WATER USE RIGHT JOB HOME AS WE CAN

Melbournians consume Counting all water use, The hotter and drier The ultimate aim is around 160 litres per Sydneysiders splash the ground, the more to keep more water day, approaching their through 320 litres of prone the water pipes circulating in our target of 155 litres using drinkable water each, running through it are communities, greening price signals, a few every day.33 Considering to cracking, shifting — and cooling us. The NSW rules and a whole-of- that few of us would and leakage. Our high Premier’s Priorities set community campaign.31 actually drink more than and increasing loss rate a target of planting one In Sydney, though per 1% of that, there is vast isn’t due to laziness or million trees over the capita consumption has scope for more efficient incompetence from our next three years. To do started reducing from supply chain optionality. water sector, but rather that, they’ll need a lot last year’s 210 daily a ‘cost-benefit’ outcome of the water that we’re litres32, we must do even of water that’s cheaper currently flushing out to better. to let fritter away than sea, rather than using invest in salvaging our drinking water — a maintenance. large proportion of which is also coming from the sea via desalination, at great financial and GHG emissions cost.

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 WASTE IN GREATER WESTERN SYDNEY

NATIONAL WASTE REPORT: GENERATION AND RECOVERY

Inextricably entwined with changes to how we manage our water resources will be a big rethink on our waste.

Like most developed countries, Australia produces a problematic amount of waste. In 2016-17, about 67 million tonnes (Mt) of waste, or 2.7t each. Of this, 54 Mt was ‘core waste’, managed by the waste and resource recovery industry, comprising 20.4 Mt from the commercial and industrial sector (C&I), 20.4 Mt from and demolition (C&D), and 13.8 Mt of municipal solid waste (MSW). Thirty-seven million tonnes was recycled, 2 Mt otherwise recovered — and 27 Mt dumped in landfill or stockpiles.34

HOW DO WE STACK UP GLOBALLY? Comparison with similar developed countries puts our waste efficiency into perspective34:

8.2Country Municipal wasteAustralia generation andDenmark fate Norway UK USA This subsection compares 2016-17 MSW generation and fate in Australia with selected countries. The data presentedRecycling for rate all jurisdictions apart62 from Australia is 68sourced from Eunomia41 (2017), which attempts74 to 45 report% a consistent definition of MSW generation and recycling rate for a selection of developed countries forTotal the resource 2016 reporting period25. It 63defines the recycling94 rate as the percentage78 of materials75 recycled, 49 compostedrecovery % and digested divided by the MSW generated.

TotalAustralia recovery’s 2016 rates-17 MSW include data waste-to-energy, was adjusted to showing be as consistent just how faras possibleahead the with leading the Eunomia European definition nationss. are in embracingThis included next-gen removing energy all masonry technologies, materials such from as cleanthe MSW incineration . and biogas capture and use.

MUNICIPALFigure 35 compares SOLID the WASTE adjusted per capita MSW generation in Australia with other nations as published Thisin Eunomia is the household (2017). and local government rubbish we all generate in our homes and communities. Adjusted comparisons provide useful context for the waste performance we’re each able to improve in our daily lives34: Figure 35 Comparison of MSW generation and recycling rates in selected countries

The average MSW waste generation across the reported countries was around 500 kg per capita. AverageAustralia’s (developed adjusted MSWworld) waste MSW generationgeneration was is about about 500 540 kg kg per per capita, capita orwith 9% approximately higher than the 50% average. of it recycled. Adjusted, Australia generates 540 kg per capita or 9% over average, and recycles a below-par 45%.34 The average MSW recycling rate was about 50%. Australia’s adjusted MSW recycling rate was about 45%. 21 Australia’s MSW generation and recycling rates are not far from the average of the countries compared.

25 To obtain a consistent definition, Eunomia (2017) excluded C&D waste, C&I waste, incinerator bottom ash, contamination rejects within dry recycling and biowaste, wood waste that is incinerated rather than recycled.

National Waste Report 2018 Final Page 38 Comparison of recycling alone masks the extent to which other countries further recover their non-recycled MSW — via waste-to-energy. For example, the Netherlands has a total ban on 35 kinds of household waste going to landfill, meaning that the vast majority of the 54% they can’t recycle goes to waste-to-energy (12% of the country’s energy generation) or clean incineration (with burn residuals in turn captured and repurposed).35 In Sweden, about half of the 98% of household waste that is recovered is incinerated for energy.36 In Australia, almost all of the 270-280 kg of household waste we each generate yearly but don’t recycle now goes into our bursting landfills — and ugly stockpiles. FOOD WASTE

Of this MSW, in 2016-17 a total of 5.0 Mt was food waste, or around 200 kg of wasted food each (about 36% of our average weekly bin contents34. Only 18% of this is recycled, with 76% going to landfill, producing vast amounts of environmentally disastrous methane.37 The opportunity cost, in lost potential energy from food waste, is also huge.

In other words, there’s still plenty of gains to be made in our own backyards and bins when it comes to our daily waste. The good news is that nationally, we’re heading in the right direction, having reduced MSW since 2006 by about 10% per capita while increasing by 11% what we do recycle of it.34 As with our water efficiency, when we put our minds to it we can easily do better on rubbish too. NSW WASTE GENERATION AND RECYCLING

The 2016-17 national figures for NSW are partly estimates only, due to recent changes in data collection, but they give us an idea of where the state stands.

NSW VIC QLD SA TAS ACT NT AUS

Core waste (annual, Mt) 18.1 13.7 11.2 5.2 4 0.9 0.9 0.4 54.4 Tonne per capita 2.37 2.13 2.25 2.01 1.15 1.71 2.15 1.62 2.16 Recycling rate 59 68 44 53 78 49 49 11 58 % Total resource recovery 62 72 47 57 82 53 53 15 62 % All figures National Waste Report34

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 While overall NSW recycling and recovery rates are around par, Australian averages tend to be dragged upwards by generally good rates of C&I and C&D waste recovery. In NSW construction is booming, likely skewing our comparative performance. According to the EPA38 last year our generation had risen to just over 20 Mt of waste, 4.25 Mt of it now MSW. Recent changes in overseas markets for recycling material plus the freeze this year on the significant Mixed Waste Organic Output (MWOO) recycling industry – plus of course Sydney’s ever-expanding population – puts more pressure on us than most parts of Australia to lift our household waste game.

NSW WASTE AND RESOURCE RECOVERY (WARR) STRATEGY 2014-21 AND UPDATES

Our state’s 2014-15 WARR Strategy39 set out six clear key goals, of which four are directly within our individual capacity to pitch in on. Results so far40 show we have more work to do:

KEY RESULT AREA 2020-21 TARGET 2017-18 UPDATE

Avoid/reduce waste generation Reduce waste per capita 15% increase

Increase recycling Increase MSW recycling to 70% 42% (no change)

Divert more waste from landfill Increase diversion to 75% 65% (up 2%)

Reduce litter 40% reduction (2016-17) 30% reduction

Before we get too glum, note again that the construction boom and robust economic activity associated with it have contributed significantly to overall per capita generation. Changes to data collection methods, including more accurate reporting from waste recovery facilities, are yet to fully wash through the system, too. We’re also making solid progress on litter reduction, a Premier’s Priority nudged along by a focused Litter Prevention Strategy. But in a fast-growing Sydney, we’re not doing as well as we must. Because all that rubbish has to go somewhere.

23 SO WHERE WILL IT ALL GO?

Landfill A 2017 EPA audit identified a NSW capacity of 31.8 million tonnes of putrescible landfill space a year, representing an annual ‘gap’ of 742,000t which relied on meeting WARR targets41. There are now only two landfills taking Sydney’s putrescent rubbish – at Woodlawn (operated by Veolia), and at Lucas Heights (SUEZ). No new landfills have been approved for a decade.42 For Sydney, burying our rubbish is a rapidly diminishing option.

Export For years we’ve dispatched it on trucks, trains and ships, despite an EPA ‘proximity law’ prohibiting transport of our waste over 150km from source. In 2016-17 up to 690,000 tonnes of Sydney’s C&D43 waste was sent to (to avoid our local levies), forcing that state to impose levies to degrade its economic viability as our dumping ground44. As for overseas, annually NSW exports 420,000 tonnes of waste paper alone45, but this too is narrowing.

Recycling and While recycling has steadily become a central component of our waste sector and Recovery is now set for a major scale-up, recovery of the latent energy in the waste we can’t recycle is an option Australians still resist. This is of particular relevance to GWS, where waste-to-energy projects have been rejected over the last decade, despite quantum improvements in the public health and environmental credentials of the technology, and the embrace of it internationally. Sensitively evolving public attitudes towards proposals like an Eastern Creek waste-to-energy incinerator, back on the table again after rejection only eighteen months ago on ‘social license’ grounds, will be a key leadership task during our utilities transition.

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 “IT’S OUR WASTE WASTE AND GREATER WESTERN SYDNEY AND IT’S OUR Waste management in GWS is as in the rest of Sydney: a mixed bin- RESPONSIBILITY.” bag. Some Councils achieve generation and recycling rates better than The Hon. , MP average, some worse. There are great local initiatives underway in GWS, Prime Minister of Australia47 but a rethink on waste is especially critical to the region, because GWS invariably gets lumped with everyone’s. Whether it’s new-gen waste- to-energy proposals as above, or just the existing array of landfills, stockpiles, treatment centres and waste truck convoys (10% of all heavy traffic in Sydney46), the region must accommodate much of the sector infrastructure.

With this in mind, the Dialogue believes GWS must lead on the transition of our waste management to a more sustainable future, exploiting the potential jobs and skills on offer but, importantly, also ensuring the rest of Sydney fairly pulls its weight in funding support and behaviour change. CHINA’S NATIONAL SWORD POLICY & COAG RESPONSE

In 2016-17 Australia exported a record high 4.3Mt of bundled-up waste for recycling overseas, but China’s ‘National Sword’ policy of tougher contamination standards on imported recycling feedstock saw its traditionally high share of our junk already declining sharply (by 40%). Since then other Asian markets for our rubbish have begun tightening restrictions too, upending a well-established export market that at its peak took about 43% of our discarded metals, 70% of our plastic and 43% of our paper and cardboard for recycling.34

In response, Prime Minister Morrison and the Council of Australian Governments agreed in August 2019 to work towards a ban on all recycling exports, flagging a major revitalisation and expansion of the local industry47. In NSW the government has responded with a $47 million package as part of its ongoing Waste Less, Recycle More campaign, to assist councils and recyclers in transitioning to the supply chain ‘new normal’.48 Meanwhile, NSW’s Energy & Environment Minister is developing a 20-Year Waste Strategy and a Circular Economy one, too.

25 5R: WHAT DO WE NEED TO DO ON WASTE? REDUCE Change the language and idea of ‘waste’ REUSE Rubbish, junk, waste — all literal and figurative throwaway words. We must instead reimagine all the things we consume as ‘5Resources’, to be used and REPURPOSE reused as ‘multiple-entry feedstocks’ in a ‘Hierarchy of Waste’ circular supply RECYCLE chain. RECOVER Reduce our per capita waste production The most powerful 5R supply chain option is to Reduce the amount we generate by buying less and using what we do more efficiently. Over half a ton of household rubbish each a year puts us in the world’s top twenty of the world’s most wasteful countries per capita49.

Reuse and repurpose Reuse and repurpose what we used to throw away wherever possible.

Improve EVERY link in our Recycling supply chain This will not just need governments and the waste industry to expand our recycling infrastructure and capacity. Diligent 5R ‘feedstock quality control’ with our kerbside bin sorting will be critical to making more recycling economically viable.

Help grow new markets for 5R feedstocks We need to deploy our individual consumer power in the same way government and business procurement choices should: to grow viable 5R markets. Buy recycled paper. Don’t buy single-use plastics. Switch to biodegradable takeaway coffee cups.

Evolve our 5R Recovery Social License We’ll all need to rethink what we’ll accept, including in our own back yards, as necessary to manage our consumption sustainably. Better recovery of 5R that can’t be recycled will need more treatment facilities and energy-to-waste projects, demanding open-mindedness, goodwill — and fair sharing of the collective community burden.

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 UPGRADING OUR UTILITIES: LINEAR TO CIRCULAR

To transition from the old Linear to a new Circular Economy Utilities Model...

Linear Utility Model Circular Economy Model

products/ products/ water materials water energy energy materials

5G 5G

5G Single-use telcos Multiple circular re-use

5G 5G

Discard excess Recovery

… we’ll have to solve a lot of very complex problems

BY GETTING IT RIGHT WE CAN ENSURE:

A cooler, greener, smarter, more sustainable future • Retaining our cooling, greening water locally, in order to use the right water for the right job • Diversifying and integrating our sources of energy generation, reducing our carbon footprint • Creating less rubbish and harvesting more of it as abundant 5Resources for re-use • Cost-sharing more truly across the whole supply chain, reducing our impact on the planet

A supercharged ‘next-gen’ Green Economy and a workforce to drive it • Building an integrated utilities Australia will demand a complete recalibration of our economy • Green utilities research and development, financing, planning, engineering and construction • A new green utilities high-skills workforce, working to a visionary, multigenerational blueprint • Limitless opportunities for new export markets in green utilities IP and green energy

A new standard of sustainable living for all • Our whole-of-community transition can be a nation-building project on an epic scale • Aligning Australian technology, ingenuity and egalitarian aspiration • Setting a new standard of sustainable living FOR EVERYONE ON THE PLANET TO SHARE.

27 SOME KEY CHALLENGES – AND OPPORTUNITIES

“I THINK THAT THE UTILITIES INTEGRATION AND ENGINEERING AT SCALE REGULATORS ARE Although it’s the isolated laboratory breakthroughs that capture public STRUGGLING TO attention and dominate discussions, this aspect of transition will arguably be the least problematic. Just as our climate change experts UNDERSTAND have been way ahead of us on the science, our research engineers THE CIRCULAR are well advanced in refining the individual components of our future ECONOMY integrated utilities. The real trick will be fitting them all together at large BUSINESS scales. MODELS.” INVESTMENT DE-RISKING

Lisa McLean, Somebody has to pay for the transition, and disruptive change is Chief Executive Officer, never risk-free. Securing the billions that will be needed over long ROI Open Cities Alliance50 timelines, for integrated utilities projects even the utilities experts themselves haven’t fully conceptualised yet, is a huge financial challenge. COST-DISTRIBUTION AND PRICING

Equally complex will be customer cost distribution and pricing mechanisms once they are completed. Current linear arrangements make it viable to price in user-pays certainty and distribute shared asset costs equally with service charges. But when the whole point of transition is to move away from large, environmentally-unsustainable frameworks – getting us all progressively ‘off grid’ – who’ll pay for those common infrastructure components still needed? The energy sector is already grappling with the even thornier matter of ‘prosumers’: renewable energy (RE) producer-consumers who don’t want to ‘chip in’ for the shared electricity grid they think they’ll no longer need, instead expecting to be paid for their RE inputs back into it. PUBLIC UTILITIES, PRIVATE PROPERTY

Then there’s the matter of ownership and jurisdiction – and finding somewhere to put things. Sydney’s existing utilities were largely created on our then-plentiful public lands. These days – in the greenfields of the Western and the Aerotropolis especially – most suitable land is privately owned. And expensive!

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 “HOW THE HELL MANAGEMENT AND CO-ORDINATION ARE WE GOING How will we coordinate the long process of transitional integration? TO CREATE A Public-private partnerships? Joint commercial ventures? Re- nationalisation? There are growing calls for a state-appointed PUBLIC DOMAIN ‘Utilities Commissioner’, potentially sitting within the Greater Sydney [FOR INTEGRATED Commission, to coordinate this activity across the rapidly growing and UTILITIES] WHEN developing Sydney area. WE DON’T OWN ANY AN EVOLVING UTILITIES ‘SOCIAL LICENSE’ LAND?” Last – and anything but the least of our challenges – will be ensuring Geoff Roberts AM, that everyone, in every community, is included in the transition. The Chief Coordinator, change in the way we provision ourselves will demand above all else Western Parkland City50 a recalibration of our shared utilities ‘social license’. The most vital task will be ensuring no-one gets left behind, or lumped with the easy ‘solution’ to everyone else’s utilities needs. We cannot outsource problems to others.

29 RECOMMENDATIONS

WE LEARN BEST by ‘having a go’, so here are some specific policy ideas to kick the transition along. Our recommendations seek to contribute to a whole-of-community approach from a few different angles, while adding to the public discussion that’s already well underway.

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 PUTTING THE WATER 1 MARKET TO WORK

THE DIALOGUE RECOMMENDS THAT A TARGET OF 100GL/20% OF RECYCLED WATER IN SYDNEY’S WATER BUDGET BY 2030 BE MADE A STANDING PREMIER’S PRIORITY

GETTING THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

Sydney’s water marketplace isn’t working as well as it could — and must. Making the necessary strategic changes won’t be easy, because like our national electricity system, our water utilities have become a complicated machine of many moving parts. As things stand, these often have clashing imperatives. We’re all aware of the agonised evolution now finally underway in our even more complex energy marketplaces. Sydney’s water sector faces very similar transition challenges. PUBLIC MONOPOLY TO MIXED MARKET

For over a century our water and wastewater services were provided by a straightforward public utility under the direct control of our elected politicians and their public servants, funded by taxpayers and delivered via centralised budgeting, planning and management. It’s easy to overlook just how brilliantly it has worked. Our evolving Water Board, and since 1995 its corporatised descendant, Sydney Water Corporation (SWC)51, has unfussily furnished us all with a mundane daily miracle on a mass scale: unlimited clean water and impeccable sanitation. No one familiar with the many international cities that still lack these basics will take this magnificent achievement for granted.

But after corporatisation in 1995, it quickly became clear that to ensure the realisation of its full benefits – efficiencies, innovation, investment diversity and sustainability – the broad monopoly SWC retains needed a commercial nudge. In 2006 the Water Industry Competition Act (WICA) set out the rules and roadmap by which private water companies could enter – enhance, invigorate — the ever- dependable stalwart’s domain.

The detailed history of how it’s since unfolded is complicated, often contentious, and beyond this paper’s scope. It’s certainly not a simple tale of ‘good guys’, ‘ guys’ and the relative merits of public versus private activity. Continued bickering about yesterday simply risks squandering the world-class expertise in both camps, united in their passion to show us non-experts what they can really do with our water, if only we’d extend them the upgraded marketplace — and recalibrated social license – to empower them to get on with it together.

31 But a hint of what’s worked, what hasn’t and what And investing in any kind of water venture is a might is revealed by a very brief look at the first risky proposition, because tomorrow it might start decade of WICA. Initially it made a great splash, with bucketing down, and not stop for three months – over thirty licenses issued to recycling and Integrated watering our gardens and parks and ovals, filling our Water Cycle Management (IWCM) specialists from swimming pools for free. the private sector, like Flow Systems, Veolia, Suez Then it might not for six months, and we’ll be and . Bold-thinking developers and forward- opening up our taps full bore again, expecting a looking local councils struck up partnerships with reliable flow. The capacity priced into our wastewater them, yielding an increasingly promising series of (and stormwater) networks is also impacted by innovations: superbly efficient, often very beautiful rainfall variability, since wherever it comes from, ‘green precincts’ such as those at Central , water has to go somewhere after we use it. Just and Green Square, and industrial supply like the almost-free sun and wind electricity now schemes like Rosehill Recycled Water and the Botany upending our energy sector’s market settings, Groundwater Treatment project. Sydney Water also rainfall is a supply chain ‘externality’ that can wash began expanding recycling projects, today operating away even the most rigorously prepared strategic 23 schemes at the modest scales the current investment plan. framework facilitates, including many in GWS. SWC’s current expectation is to double its recycling output But if that’s not tricky enough, once we start adding over the next 25 years, to 80 billion litres.52 much more recycled water into the equation– as we must – it’s easy to see how quickly the sector’s There were teething problems during this first water already-uncertain ‘dam-deliver-and-discard’ usage market shift into recycling, especially with finance parameters will be affected. Even so, we’ll still need and viability. Licensing and private-public integration the existing big-scale network – which won’t get any has also often been a cumbersome, costly affair. The cheaper to keep available. This rapidly-changing sector’s accumulating IWCM technical and project supply-and-demand method rightly makes investors delivery expertise, however, and especially its impact wary and conservative, with regards to the huge on our community perceptions of water recycling, has capital outlays that any new system of pipes, pumps, been of great value. treatment plants and reservoirs need (not to mention expanded desalination plants, higher dam walls, and But then a contentious 2017 ruling by the pricing and upgraded ocean outfalls). These significant strategic license regulator IPART effectively –or so some argue investment decisions will be keeping our water – stalled things53. And no new WICA licenses have experts busy for the next few disruptive years. been issued since. It’s important to keep in mind that our monopoly COST SHARING, INVESTMENT RISK, ‘first and last resort’ supplier of drinking water and UNIVERSALITY AND RELIABILITY wastewater connections for all – good old reliable Sydney Water — is now just as bound as any private Sidestepping the details crystalised in that IPART sector concern to conduct its business in the best ruling, the core problem is the generic utilities interest of its corporate investors, which is all of us, transition noted earlier: going forward, who’s going via our shareholder Ministers. Strait-jacketing the to pay for the fully-integrated public-private water SWC Board’s investment decisions further are the networks we need, in a way that safeguards the non-negotiable ‘public service’ obligations enshrined reliability and universality we’ve come to enjoy from in the SWC Act, that they must make its services SWC, but equally fosters the risk-taking innovation of available on demand to everyone in its operating the IWCM providers? area. On top of that are all the license, pricing, environmental and public health regulations and determinations imposed by other public bodies, such as IPART, the Environment Protection Agency and NSW Health.

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 This all adds up to a truly daunting weight of systemic WHAT IS THE (TRUE) COST OF THE PRICE OF inertia which simply can’t – and shouldn’t — be WATER? recalibrated without a lot of clever, hard, and above all co-operative thinking. The role water users must Some argue the water and wastewater services SWC play will be crucial too. To get the changes right, must provide ‘for all, on demand’ are too cheap16. our politicians will need our patient and thoughtful Sounds great for consumers – except it makes it goodwill. As with all the astounding utility services economically hard for IWCM recycling projects to we’ve come to take for granted, nothing makes our compete, ironically including those that SWC itself is elected representatives more inclined to ‘not change keen to expand. Dirt cheap BAU water also removes anything’ than the prospect of their voters turning on incentives for best-practise leak management, risks their taps, and nothing coming out! distorting the commercial considerations behind expensive imminent decisions, and above all, Yet however complicated it will be, we simply must postpones any need for us all to rethink the most change things in our water marketplace, if it’s to efficient use – and true worth – of our water. provide what we’ll need: the right water for the right job. There are a lot of different ways our experts and A MORE PRICE-FERTILE MARKETPLACE leaders could go about the task. Here’s a few of the Debating the details is for experts, but options could more powerful – and perhaps problematic — levers include: and dials they could adjust, to tune our shared water machinery better for tomorrow.54 Contestable new growth: Tweak SWC’s ‘universal on demand’ obligations, so WICA entrants can compete GET IPART UMPIRING ON THE RIGHT fairly for water services in new growth areas. PLAYING FIELD Contestable funding? SWC accumulates a vast The current ‘umpire’ of the water marketplace is the public asset of investment capital via ‘postage 55 Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal , a stamp’ service charges. Even partial access for WICA statutory body that among much else, issues water competitors would level the tendering playing field. licenses and sets prices. Its 2017 ruling to impose ‘retail minus’ pricing on IWCM projects has arguably Reduced ring-fencing: Smarter integration of tilted the playing field too favourably towards BAU. Its water, wastewater and stormwater ‘products and processes can also add expensive, time-consuming feedstocks’ would supercharge IWCM project viability. red tape to a marketplace that needs agility and accessibility. IPART’s independence and integrity is Non-residential rates for IWCM: As would applying not in question but the many competing interests cheaper ‘non-residential’ rates to innovative ‘green it must reconcile, and the ever-present ebb and precincts’, allowing many more urban oases to flow of political debate, can sometimes mean its bloom. determinations are not as good for the game as they might be. MANDATORY RECYCLING IN NEW GROWTH PROJECTS A firm government objective around water recycling and reuse, as we have recommended, will help Many urban planners call for uniform recycling rules ensure IPART determinations give due consideration in new growth projects. If all developers faced the to the sustainability of Sydney’s water supply and same mandatory requirements, local councils could how pricing flows through to innovation and climate- accelerate their greening and cooling plans. oriented urban design.

33 LIMITS ON OCEAN OUTFALL

Another option is to limit what we fritter out to sea.56 A zero ocean outfall target, achieved in other coastal cities, would leave no choice but recycling! Think of the ‘pipe n’ pump’ cost-savings alone – especially from way out in the GWS greenfields. POTABLE WATER RE-USE

Many jurisdictions worldwide embrace indirect and even direct ‘potable water re-use’, which involves some form and extent of recycling wastewater back into existing supply networks. There are huge advantages to this approach, especially in scale, efficiency and existing network transition, but also huge challenges, not least regarding social license and quality control perception issues. AN INDEPENDENT MARKET OPERATOR

If this is all sounds complicated, it’s because it is. Which is why some argue for an independent Water Market Operator, as we have now in the energy sector, to take charge of the whole machine and get it humming beautifully. Another option could be an Integrated Utilities Minister with an expert public service staff, to fit other elements like waste and water nutrient harvesting, agribusiness, energy, urban cooling and planning elements into a joined-up integrated utilities plan. POLITICAL LEADERSHIP

The SWC Act allows our shareholder Ministers to direct how our water is managed, including in ‘the public interest’ and ‘non-commercial’ ways. A top-down Ministerial direction may be all that is required to trigger a wide range of public and private sector and consumer-level initiatives that can help reach a recycled water target, as we recommend. THE CHALLENGE: A FIT-FOR-PURPOSE WATER MARKETPLACE

Sydney’s water marketplace will be working properly when it provides the right water for the right job, reflecting closer consideration of the water we consume, and how and where we flush it away:

• Drinking water on tap whenever needed, but never wasted on non-drinking purposes; • Cooling water for gardens, pools, parks and creeks that won’t drain potable water supplies; and, • Fine-tuned, reliable feedstock for thirsty precision industries and 24-7 agribusinesses.

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 THE TOOLS: SHAREHOLDER MINISTERS, SWC, WICA, EPA, IPART AND GOODWILL

Though Sydney’s water machine is a complicated one with many moving parts, our water experts have their hands and eyes on every lever and dial. Complexity and disagreement over details are no excuse for inaction. THE START SITE: SETTING A RECYCLING HARD TARGET

Our recommendation recognises that there is no silver bullet. Indeed, there are a myriad of means to put the water market on a more sustainable footing. Setting a target at the level of a Premier’s Priority would, if nothing else, get our experts debating the best way to go about it! THE WHOLE-OF-COMMUNITY PLAN

The Dialogue recommends putting the Sydney water marketplace to work, starting with a hard target on recycling

Political and policy The NSW Premier adopts, as a standing Premier’s Priority, a target of 100GL/20% leadership recycled water in Sydney’s water budget by 2030. The Minister for Water, as portfolio shareholder of Sydney Water Corporation, directs SWC to manage the achievement of this target ‘in the public interest’.

Expertise to prevail The SWC Board and Managing Director devise a strategic plan for achieving the target, seeking necessary regulatory, license, funding and pricing adjustments as required.

Private and NFP SWC strategic plan maximises co-operative engagement with WICA licensees, sector cooperation accelerating public-private water network integration, and the introduction of ‘prosumer’ and ‘circular economy’ water innovations, such as in-home recycling units, wastewater harvesting and agribusiness opportunities, and local government Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD). Assurances on urban river quality, natural flow, swimmability and amenity must form one half of a ‘water compact’ with Western Sydneysiders, underwriting a recalibration of the water recycling Social License.

Our collective Whole-of-community adjustment of water perceptions, expectations and habits is response required to align with the Premier’s Priority and give our water experts’ plan every chance of success.

35 EXPANDING WASTE 2 ‘STEWARDSHIP’

THE DIALOGUE RECOMMENDS THAT THE NSW GOVERNMENT LEAD A ‘STEWARDSHIP OF WASTE’ EFFORT TO PHASE OUT NON- RECYCLABLE DISPOSABLE COFFEE CUPS

COLLECTIVELY CLOSING OUR CONSUMPTION CIRCLE

Consuming sustainably is anything but a radical new concept. It’s how humans lived – productively and happily — for all but the last hundred odd years, before we developed the many wonderful but potentially harmful tools of mass consumption. Those tools aren’t ‘evil’. Our flair and appetite for mass consumption has unquestionably made the world a better place, for more of us all the time.

But no one on the planet desires or defends the pitfalls of unsustainable consumption: the accumulating by-products of cheap mass production and distribution which we have, for too long, not kept an eye on and are now staring in our face. Mountains of rubbish and plastic-choked oceans are a reminder that ‘consumption’ doesn’t start with us buying something and end when we’ve finished using it. Including the two missing parts of our mass consumption culture is how we’ll empower ourselves to keep enjoying its benefits while avoiding its pitfalls. Those missing parts are the full production costs of the things we buy, and the cost of dealing with them once we’re finished with them. The former are increasingly being factored in via higher prices for sustainably sourced and produced goods, as well as regulation and ethical investment mechanisms.

Pricing the latter into our purchases is the essence of the ‘Stewardship’ model of waste – rather, 5Resource — management. THE STEWARDSHIP MODEL OF 5R

There are many different ways of including in the initial price of a product the eventual cost of dealing with the waste it will likely produce. They can be vast in cost-imposition complexity, as with the epic ongoing struggle to apply a true price to our fossil fuel energy consumption. Or they can be price-point direct, like the higher retail price some soft drink merchants have added, to fund the government’s successful Return and Earn scheme57.

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 In Australia a few particularly problematic products, BUY IT? ENJOY ITS BENEFITS? PAY TO DEAL like tyres and lamps containing mercury, are formally WITH IT WHEN YOU’RE DONE WITH IT, TOO! (if not compulsorily) covered by the federal Product It’s a fair rule. By extending it to every product Stewardship Act 201158. Most successful of these we consume, we won’t only fund the proper is the National Television and Computer Recycling management of the too-much-waste we each Scheme59, which requires importers and makers to currently create. More importantly – the true aim of help manage the proper recycling and recovery of stewardship – we’ll incentivise ourselves to create e-waste. The cost of those ‘free’ e-collection bins less with our purchases in the first place. at local transfer stations is factored into the price We’re already embracing stewardship even if we of our devices, and the result since 2011 has been don’t know it, via many schemes initiated – without an impressive 99% ‘safe and ethical’ recycling any nanny-state heavy-handedness at all – by the rate. The implications were not lost on the 2018 sectors which create all these great but potentially Senate Committee on Waste and Recycling: it has problematic consumer products for us in the first recommended that all Stewardship schemes under place. Our telecommunications industry’s Mobile the Act should be mandatory.60 Muster62 ‘free’ phone-recycling scheme, the substitution by Coles, Woolworths, IGA and Harris Applying the concept of stewardship should not really Farm63 of free plastic bags with environmentally- need government intervention or heavy-handed friendlier versions you pay for, and bureaucracy. This is especially so as consumers Packaging Covenant Association’s64 target of making become more attuned to our unmanaged over- all packaging recyclable by 2025 are all examples consumption as a problem, whether our heightening via which the true cost of the things we buy is awareness is through programs like the ABC’s War being gradually priced and distributed fairly into our on Waste series, or simply our casual observations consumption lifestyle. of overflowing local rubbish bins. Increasingly, we all get it: that everything we buy comes with an It’s an old idea whose time has come again, if you inherent waste problem to be dealt with at some consider how thrifty our great great grandparents point. However we might grumble about the various were, how much use they squeezed out of what they stewardship mechanisms that already apply to our did buy, and how little they needed to throw away. rubbish – whether it’s an industrial landfill levy Of course, mass production has since presented us ($141.20 a ton for MSW)61 or the cost of an extra with greater sustainable consumption challenges, kerbside bin – few would quibble with the underlying such as plastics, an abundance of cheap food, and principle: many more available products. Vastly improving our capacity to recycle and recover their 5R by-products – and helping to pay for it – is what expanding stewardship now requires.

37 LEADERSHIP ON STEWARDSHIP IN GWS EXPANDING STEWARDSHIP WILL NEED OUR LEADERS TO: No LGAs have more to gain from doing so than those in GWS, where the mix of residential density is Develop and expand our 5R ‘circular supply chain’ increasingly playing havoc with kerbside bin sorting. Political leadership on Recycling and Recovery: Canterbury-Bankstown is a leader in improving More waste recycling and recovery education, recycling performance, for example with a Multi- funding, infrastructure assets, R&D support. More Unit Dwelling pilot study that reduced kerbside bin confident advocacy and engagement on social plastics contamination rates to just 4%65, and first- license change. mover leadership on a planned 100% ban on single- use plastics in its own Council operations66. Penrith Commercial leadership on Recycling and Recovery: Council is encouraging better recycling habits by More research, development and marketing of truly only collecting residents’ general (non-recycling) bin recyclable versions of the great consumer products every two weeks, giving residents a great incentive to you offer. More CSR embrace of stewardship ensure putrescent organics go into their free weekly schemes. green bin. Or they can pay extra for a weekly pickup of the lot. Stewardship ‘pricing in’ of waste costs, in Help existing industry transition to 5R supply a nutshell, dictates that we do the optimum thing or chains. No one gets left behind in this utilities bear the cost.67 transition. Existing workers, businesses and industries that may struggle in a recycling-and- EXPANDING STEWARDSHIP WILL NEED US recovery circular economy must be helped to retool, ALL TO: re-skill, re-align and re-establish.

Situate all we buy in our own 5R ‘circular supply EXPANDED STEWARDSHIP TEST CASE: chain’ OUR ONE BILLION TAKEAWAY COFFEES

Can this purchase be Reduced (or avoided)? Will In August 2018 the Parliamentary Catering team this purchase be Re-usable or Re-purposable? at the NSW Department of Parliamentary Services Is this purchase Recyclable? Will it be otherwise implemented a policy of replacing existing non- Recoverable, as energy or compost? recyclable disposable coffee cups available from the Parliament’s café with ‘non-waxed compostable 68 Rethink our recycling and recovery social licenses paper cups’ topped by ‘compostable plastic lids’. This is in line with its 100% commitment to the We can’t bury our rubbish any more, Sydney. We removal of non-biodegradable and single-use can’t send it overseas or interstate. We must take plastics, with the policy also ditching plastic straws, ownership of the problem. This will need us all to cutlery and plates. rethink what we’ll accept ‘in our own backyards’.

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 The impact of such leadership by example from our Parliamentary public servants extends well “WHAT WE WANT TO SEE beyond the localised, and relatively modest, IS [PLASTICS] INDUSTRY impact of unrecyclable plastic in the Parliament LEADERSHIP, AND SUPPORT café. Parliamentary Catering’s current supplier of compostable disposable accoutrements is BioPak, FOR THAT LEADERSHIP, AND with whom it continues to work to expand its RESEARCH, AND DESIGN, AND compostable sourcing to other plastic disposables, such as bin liners, as well as the gradual extension THE IDENTIFICATION OF NEW of compostability and ‘point to point’ recycling in PRODUCTS AND MARKETS, all its waste management, including Parliament’s AND HOW WE CAN FACILITATE commercial kitchens. This approach to sustainable procurement is also increasingly being replicated in THAT, SO YOU GET A the private sector. COMMERCIALLY SUSTAINABLE WASTE MANAGEMENT The real point here is the evolution such procurement choices can spark in the fledgling ‘new market’, OPERATION.” growing the viability of the innovative, risk-taking 5R The Hon. Scott Morrison, MP Prime Minister of Australia69 supplier-enablers that are critical to the stewardship model. Government procurement is a particularly powerful stewardship lever for whole-of-community leadership. Many Councils are now helping to expand the markets for feedstocks like used glass and paper, problem plastics and construction waste through self- imposed operational and contractual requirements, such as in local road project tendering. PICKING WINNERS, OR ‘EVERYONE WINS’?

A government procurement choice can be the difference between a more environmentally- sustainable but commercially-riskier venture failing, or becoming viable. This can allow sustainable product innovators to re-invest in R&D and market development, take hold in an ever-broader retail space, and ultimately change an entire industry. When minimalist public service activity like switching coffee cup suppliers potentially activates great ‘common ’ added-value, and exerts only a marginal impact on consumer price while helping recalibrate a market’s operating metrics to properly factor in long-ignored externalities, it is not ‘winner- picking, free market interference’.

It is precisely the public interest duty we employ our public servants to discharge.

39 TACKLING THE ROOT OF ‘PROBLEM WASTE’

The best stewardship schemes are those that encourage industry to tackle the root of a waste problem itself. When it comes to the take-away coffee cups we all love for their convenience – once, then dump – this is the wafer-thin, plastic lining in the cheapest mass production versions. That’s the fiddlesome component that makes them uneconomic to recycle. Even the environmentally-friendlier versions which contain Polylactic Acid (PLA) rather than the more common Polystyrene (PS) remain problematic. Plant starch ‘bioplastics’ like PLA have been greeted as saviours of our plastic-choked planet, but their biodegradability is still far from perfected. It’s going to take a lot more industry R&D and money to do that.70

Fortunately everybody gets to pull their weight in this whole-of-community utilities transition working bee, including our most powerful politician and our world- leading recycling industry players. Nationally, we are well-placed to help shift the take-away coffee marketplace to commercially viable, fully recyclable cups, through home-grown expertise and market power in companies such as Visy, and targeted R&D concessions and incentives from a federal government with a stated interest in tackling our waste crisis. If in solving our take-away problem they happen to perfect a truly biodegradable plastic, the effort will be worth even more, in export dollars, local jobs, and, of course, sustainable consumption more broadly.

While they’re busy with that job, the rest of us can join this working bee waste stewardship experiment too, by changing our own take-away coffee habits. It’s not as if it will cost us much.

“PUT TOGETHER THE ONE BILLION WE THROW AWAY EVERY YEAR, AND AUSTRALIA’S DISPOSABLE COFFEE CUP SNAKE WOULD CIRCLE THE WORLD TWO AND A HALF TIMES” ABC’s ‘War on Waste’

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 COFFEE CUP STEWARDSHIP PRICING

TAKEAWAY OPTIONS CUP (BULK ORDER) LID (BULK) TAKEAWAY INPUT COST

BioPak Fully compostible PLA 8c = 22 cents 14c

‘Simply Cups’ landfill Managed source/recycled PS 4.7c = 17.4 cents diversion program paper

1c to diversion network 12.7c Business as usual (e.g. Industry norm PS 3.5c = 13.5 cents FoodPackagingOnline) (PS liner, scale supply) 10c

An embedded ‘waste stewardship’ price signal of under ten cents in a $4-$5 take-away coffee surely can’t be a budget buster, for cafes or their customers71. THE CHALLENGE: APPLYING STEWARDSHIP TO OUR TAKEAWAY COFFEE CUPS Wherever we sit on the Latte Line, we all love a morning brew on the run. So we can all do our bit. THE TOOLS Government leadership, voter and consumer support. THE START SITE NSW Government procurement choices.

41 THE WHOLE-OF-COMMUNITY PLAN

The Dialogue recommends that the NSW Government lead a ‘stewardship of waste’ effort to phase out non- recyclable disposable coffee cups

Political and policy The NSW Government extends to all public sector procurement the Parliamentary leadership Catering Services standard on disposable coffee cups, with a view to discontinue use of all non-recyclable versions. Expertise to prevail The disposables industry, aided by government incentives, develops a mass scale takeaway cup that is easily and fully recyclable.

Private and NFP There are already many coffee industry strategies for dealing responsibly with sector cooperation takeaway cups. Responsible Cafes72, 7-11’s Simply Cup73 scheme and the RTRNA’s Reusable Cup Network74 are just three excellent examples combining the best of our commercial and community instincts. Individually, every café has the power to choose what cups it sells, and what price they need to charge for them to remain in business.

Our collective More importantly, every individual voter and consumer has control over which response cafes we support, and what takeaway cups we choose to use.

No-one gets left To sidestep the unhappy UK experience, where a similar, briefly-successful behind stewardship trial in Westminster Parliament75 was ditched following disposables industry lobbying, we should extend current suppliers a fair opportunity to retool. There are no ‘bad guys’ in the current takeaway coffee supply chain. We’re the ones who’ve been buying unrecyclable cups by the billion and then just throwing them away, after all.

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 LGA GREENING AND 3 COOLING TOOLS

THE DIALOGUE RECOMMENDS THAT LOCAL PLANNING TOOLS AVAILABLE TO COUNCILS FOR COOLING AND GREENING THEIR LGA BE ENHANCED WHEREVER POSSIBLE

TURNING DOWN THE HEAT — LOCALLY

Being a Mayor in GWS is one of the toughest leadership roles in Australia. Local governance anywhere is a hard and often thankless act of public service, but over the last two decades in Western Sydney, it’s been a more grinding exercise in reconciling competing demands than usual. The population growth and infrastructure pressures the region has experienced, often with lagging resource and service allocations, has been unprecedented. Councils have a relatively limited capacity to influence higher policy decisions, yet invariably bear the brunt of their impact at the grassroots.

Those who govern it don’t need alerting to Western Sydney’s Hot Issue. They live it daily and are onto it, individually and collectively. The Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils (WSROC)76 push for urban heat mitigation to become a Premier’s Priority is just one of many localised approaches whose aims inform the Dialogue’s specific recommendations, and whose sense of regional urgency we share. WSROC’s member Councils have many stakeholders to reconcile to keep their communities cool. More green infrastructure will profoundly impact other infrastructure activity. More blue infrastructure will demand more water recycling. Less heat-absorbing asphalt will mean planning for less local car use. Utilities transition will require tricky social license compromises.

Strong local leadership and mutual community trust will be crucial, and so Councils must be equipped with the necessary planning tools and autonomy to deliver it.

“…IN THE WESTERN SYDNEY CONTEXT, ADDRESSING URBAN HEAT IS A MATTER OF SURVIVAL FOR VULNERABLE COMMUNITIES.” WSROC: Turn Down The Heat 201876

43 COUNCIL LEADERSHIP VIA PUBLIC-PRIVATE COOPERATION AND SHARED MUTUAL BENEFIT Any local planner seeking a sizzling whole-of- community approach to cooling and greening their Local developers are getting on board, even where LGA in a rapidly warming wider world could start those higher planning rules don’t compel them. with the ’s 2017 Environmental Key to the public good/commercial ‘trade-offs’ Sustainability Strategy77. It’s hardly surprising being negotiated – such as more CBD floor-space that such a comprehensive approach to Western for installed dual water systems – has been the Sydney’s Hot Issue would come from the heart of Council’s far-sighted commissioning of granular our Central River City. For all the attention lavished economic modelling, demonstrating the hard-headed on the greenfield sites of commercial benefits of greener, cooler development. and Aerotropolis, the brunt of GWS’s new millennium growing pains to date has been borne by established GIVING LGAS THE GREENING, COOLING LGAs like Parramatta, Canterbury-Bankstown and PLANNING TOOLS THEY NEED . Parramatta has absorbed nearly 150,000 new residents since 2001, more than any other The best-practice outcomes being achieved by Sydney LGA. This has already driven unprecedented Parramatta and others, like the with levels of urban infill development, and current its award-winning Cooling the City Strategy, and projections are for another 150,000 by 203677. Campbelltown’s Billabong Parklands Project, show what focused local bureaucracies can achieve, even BY EXAMPLE with limited planning tools and authority. Which begs the question: are we giving Councils what they Leading by example is Pathway 4 of Parramatta need to keep their communities green and cool, Council’s environmental response. It sets ambitious and are other policy objectives in conflict with our 2038 internal targets, in emissions reduction, sustainability ambitions? renewable energy use, water use, waste reduction, landfill diversion and Council procurement choices. BUILDING SUSTAINABILITY INDEX (BASIX) Every Council dollar spent is now subject to rigorous sustainability criteria. One place to start looking for answers is BASIX78. Since its introduction in 2004, it has become a WITH PUBLIC SERVICE EXPERTISE AND key tool in NSW for underwriting the sustainability CREATIVITY of the built environment. BASIX certification in the Development Application stage imposes minimum The Council’s Environmental Outcomes team is standards on a new home’s energy efficiency, water thinking laterally and leveraging existing development efficiency and thermal comfort. A 2015 review control tools and higher planning instruments to lifted targets, though some argued not enough. embed water recycling, heat mitigation, urban Shortcomings remain79, and as well as even higher greening and cooling into its rapidly-densifying CBD. minimums standards other improvements could include:

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 Helping markets eliminate the ‘split incentive’ problem: Improved LGA capacity for compliance follow-up: Targets for multi-dwelling developments, especially BASIX is a front-end planning tool and strong ‘on high-rise, are generally lower than for stand-alone paper’ greening and cooling elements, such as houses. This partly reflects certain design realities, air-conditioning and landscaping choices, can but scale developers also cite the so-called ‘split- easily devolve during a project’s build. Improving a incentive’ problem when opposing more stringent Council’s capacity for checking and enforcing BASIX targets, reluctant to bear the higher construction compliance would bolster the system. cost of efficiencies that will only benefit occupiers80. Mandatory disclosure of a dwelling’s energy Sustainable technology is quickly changing and BASIX performance on sale or lease, and more public must too: Current scoring in the three component education about the long-term utilities savings in areas of Water, Energy, and Thermal Comfort take higher BASIX performance, are two ways the system only limited account of first-generation ‘sustainable can help markets properly ‘price in’ the cost-benefit living’ components like rainwater tanks and solar return for developers. panels, and none of the latest developments. The growing ubiquity of residential green technologies like Revisiting the relationship between BASIX and local battery home storage, smart metering, household controls: BASIX standards enjoy precedence over water recycling units and even multi-dwelling, Council instruments such as Development Control integrated utility trigeneration systems will soon Plans (DCP), to ensure jurisdictional consistency demand a major overhaul. and over-ride weaker local benchmarks. Yet many Councils, particularly in GWS where the UHI effect WATER SENSITIVE URBAN DESIGN is urgent, want to impose more stringent cooling and greening requirements than BASIX does. Another LGA thinking laterally to keep its Could defaulting to the highest ‘minimum planning communities cool is the City of Blacktown. standard’ available in LGAs be feasible? Its Environmental Sustainability Framework81 underwrites some of Sydney’s most sophisticated More trade-offs of higher sustainability for commercial Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) outcomes, benefit: More financially attractive Floor Space Ratios such as the Angus Creek Stormwater Harvesting (FSR) driving better BASIX outcomes is one systemic project which waters the Blacktown International approach Councils like Parramatta have leveraged Sports Park, and the award-winning Blacktown to good effect. There’s great scope for enabling Showground redevelopment, which integrates other levers, particularly accelerated development industrial catchment run-off with community gardens, processes. A ‘Green Door’ BASIX pathway that water play areas, a biodiverse wetland and enhanced LGAs could open, guaranteeing developers a set natural waterway flows. Setting a recycling processing time in exchange for better sustainability, target, as we recommend, is one way higher level is one option. Other ‘bargaining chips’ could be planners can incentivise such local WSUD projects. government subsidy or access to Green Bonds, To help Councils better navigate their regulatory discounted LGA rates and reduced car parking complexity in practice, legislation governing agencies requirements. such as the EPA, WaterNSW and NSW Health may also need a rethink.

45 COOL STREETS IS A ROAD MAP COOLING OUR ROADS AND STREETS SHOWING THE WAY FORWARD Blacktown is also leading the way on GWS’s baking FOR MUNICIPALITIES road networks. Their Cool Streets83 pilot was a highly-successful, two-phase experiment in building SUFFERING FROM SIMILAR community acceptance of kerbside greenery in (UHI) PROBLEMS ACROSS their local streets, and Council supports a paradigm AUSTRALIA, WHILE ALLOWING shift in the approach road safety authorities take to tree cover. The Austroads ‘clear zone’ standard FOR REGIONAL VARIATION. embraced by NSW Roads and Maritime Services is Linda Corkery, National President, 82 an inconsistent guideline that emerged from 1960s Australian Institute of Landscape Architects rural America, one that effectively bars useful tree cover along our major urban roads. The standards are under review and Blacktown, squarely in GWS’s UHI ‘hot zone’, argues that Councils, rather than RMS, should determine their community’s preferred public health and safety ‘net balance’, between the collision risk posed to occasional ‘errant vehicles’ by big roadside trees, and the continuous heat mitigating benefits of their shade for all.84 IF WE’RE GOING TO HAVE THE BCA, NATHERS, NABERS, GREEN STAR AND GROWTH THAT IS COMING, OTHER SEPPS WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR A full audit of the redundancies, loopholes, NOT, IT’S IMPORTANT WE GET inconsistencies and competing imperatives in NSW’s THE RECREATION, THE OPEN complicated built environment regulatory framework SPACES, THE PARKLANDS... is well beyond the scope of this paper. But other sustainability tools that might benefit from some THE RIVERS ARE THERE. LET’S realignment, to better help local Council cooling and SPEND THE MONEY, LET’S greening strategies, can be found within the over- COLLABORATE, LET’S GET arching Building Code of Australia, the Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (an optional/parallel THESE RIVERS TO WHERE component of BASIX), the National Australian Built THEY SHOULD BE. Environment Rating System, the Cr Khal Asfour, Mayor, City of Canterbury-Bankstown85 Council Australia ‘Green Star’ scale, and other State Environmental Planning Policies.

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 CAN THE WEST HAVE ITS RIVERS BACK REBIRTH OF ‘OUR LIVING RIVER’ PLEASE, SYDNEY? The Master Plan, now being Canterbury-Bankstown is another established ‘middle delivered by the Parramatta River Catchment Group ring’ LGA in GWS that’s borne the brunt of Sydney’s (PRCG)88 is evolving into an anchoring centrepiece recent growing pains. Together with Hurstville, this for this plea, in a coalescing of many individual Inner South West statistical area has expanded by strategies in GWS that seek to revitalise their urban the third-largest amount since 2001 (123,000) and communities via cooler, greener, more amenable is now Sydney’s most (623,000).86 Local integration with the natural world. A powerful leaders have long recognised the importance to its collective of riverside LGAs, government and public own cooling and greening strategies of its rivers and authorities, and local community groups, many creeks, most of them overwhelmed by urban the PRCG aims to reclaim the ‘place where the eels pollution. Since 1979, the Riverkeeper program lie down’ as the ‘Living River’ which, for over 60,000 driven by the Combined Councils years, the Aboriginal custodians have revered as one Committee87 has sought to improve their amenity in a trinity of living, breathing ‘Entities’: Duba (land), and health–one of many local initiatives expressing a Budu (water) and Barra (Sky). common regional request. The effort to improve GWS’s urban waterways has been underway for some time. Last year , which re-opened in 2015, attracted A PREVENTATIVE [HEALTH] 80,000 swimmers. Under the coordination of Sydney APPROACH IS CURRENTLY Water Corporation, which has now seconded to it three full time employees, the PRCG aims to establish TAKEN FOR USERS OF three more Parramatta River swimming spots WATERWAYS IN THE EAST, by 2025, along with improving water quality and monitoring, and enhancing local greening, cooling WITH BEACHWATCH. THERE and amenity. Key components of the master plan NEEDS TO BE EQUITY FOR include expanding swimmability, reducing stormwater THE [URBAN RIVERS OF] THE run-off, and rejuvenating the river habitats of five iconic native species. Another key is to lift the water WEST. quality monitoring regime, so that the ongoing health Dr Ian Wright, Water Quality Specialist, of GWS rivers enjoys the same daily public scrutiny as 90 Western Sydney our . WE HELPED PAY TO FIX YOUR BEACHES. WILL YOU HELP PAY TO FIX OUR RIVERS?

Sydney spent $310m on the ocean outfalls that made our beaches safely swimmable again89. The Dialogue reckons it’s time we did the same for the neglected waterways west of the Bridge.

47 THE CHALLENGE: GREENING AND COOLING OUR LOCAL COMMUNITIES

No-one knows better how to cool down their community than those who live, work and play in it, and no-one has more right or obligation to lead the way than the Mayors and Councillors they elect.

THE TOOLS

Built environment planning instruments, LGA sustainability strategies, local democracy. THE START SITE

Individual LGAs. THE WHOLE-OF-COMMUNITY PLAN

The Dialogue recommends that the local planning tools available to Councils for cooling and greening their LGA be enhanced wherever possible.

Political and policy Mayors and Councillors recognise and embrace their leadership role in shaping leadership individual responses to Western Sydney’s Hot Issue. Higher level leaders must also recognise the community-facing role of local government and address conflicting policy priorities wherever there are roadblocks to urban cooling initiatives.

Expertise to prevail Council staff continue to develop greening and cooling strategies, and make the case for any desirable changes to planning instruments and authority.

Public, private and Cooperative interaction of local developers, businesses and community groups NFP cooperation should seek to maximise mutual benefit outcomes, aligning environmental sustainability, commercial viability and community liveability.

Our collective Sydneysiders must recognise the higher urgency of urban cooling and greening response needs in GWS, and accommodate any planning, policy, regulatory and funding implications that duly arise.

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 DEMAND MANAGING 4 OUR ENERGY USE

THE DIALOGUE RECOMMENDS THAT ALL PUBLIC SERVICE OFFICE BUILDINGS OPERATE WITH A MINIMUM PERMISSIBLE AIR CONDITIONER THERMOSTAT SETTING OF 25° CELSIUS

COOLING OUR INSIDES, COOKING OUR OUTSIDES

Residential air conditioning only appeared half a century ago but already there are over a billion units worldwide, and by 2050 this will have increased more than threefold.91 This represents a huge energy problem, since air conditioning is one of the thirstier guzzlers of electricity we’ve invented. A small unit uses the same as four fridges, and a central unit, as much as fifteen fridges. Already America uses as much electricity cooling its buildings alone as the UK uses for everything92.

The International Energy Agency estimates that once the developing world catches up, air conditioning will consume about 13% of all global electricity and produce 2b tonnes of CO2-e.93 Since electricity generation creates about a third of Australia’s greenhouse emissions94, the folly of trying to cool our insides by further cooking our outsides should be especially clear to us. It’s like trying to avoid sunstroke by sheltering in our own shadows.

In 2018 2.3 million Australians admitted to leaving the air-con on when not even home, with 24% of us being self-confessed wasters, guilty of inefficiencies like open windows and doors, undrawn curtains, cooling empty rooms, and leaving idle appliances on, emitting pointless heat.95 Our biggest fail is setting air-con thermostats too low. Our average ideal ‘room temperature’ these days is an unnecessarily low 22°C, rather unbecoming of the sun-loving people of the hottest continent on earth.

The impact of our careless air-con habits is not restricted to unnecessarily high energy bills, although the average Sydneysider wastes about $90 in air- con electricity each summer95. Far more concerning is the cumulative effect of hundreds of thousands of us using air-con wastefully. And simultaneously, since air-con is an electrical load we all call on at the same time. And the hotter it gets, the more we all crank it up, in greater numbers. The harder our air-cons work inside, the more hot air gets exhausted outside… and so the harder still it needs to work inside, to keep that outside heat at bay. Meanwhile the load on our local wires, transformers and substations keeps spiralling up.

49 Factor in UHI effect and local temperatures far higher than elsewhere on the hottest days and it’s not hard to recognise that in a region like GWS the growing ubiquity of all this unchecked air-con is about far more than wasted money. At temperature extremes, the air-con ‘electricity death spiral’ can drive systemic overload – and trigger catastrophic shutdown of the power grid. Studies of peak power demand – 3pm to 6pm, when sweltering kids and commuters return home – show that on the year’s hottest days it can surge a massive 45% over the annual average96. More than enough to crash the whole cooling party.

USING AIR-CON TO KEEP WESTERN SYDNEY COOL IS AS FUTILE AS SHELTERING IN OUR OWN SHADOW TO AVOID SUNSTROKE.

OVERLOADING THE GRID

It’s not as if these dangers have gone unnoticed. Calamitous temperatures in January 2019 caused 200,000 Melburnians to lose all power on a staggered basis as part of a controlled ‘load shedding’ response to demand suddenly outstripping available supply. An unexpected loss of 1800MW in the latter was a contributor to the shortfall, but the chief culprit was the surge in air-con use, driven by sustained 46°C temperatures and record high .97 The Australian Energy Market Operator was able to ameliorate the impact by also activating existing load shedding agreements with major commercial users like Alcoa, but the lessons are clear and ominous. It doesn’t take much for mass air conditioning to become the straw that breaks the camel’s grid.

Governments have long recognised this, responding with preemptive policies such as NSW’s $200-$1000 discount scheme for Energy Efficient Air Conditioners (currently on hold due to compliance concerns)98. The sector is also experimenting with ‘peak air-con’ demand easing incentives and smart metering99, while offering advice on improving usage habits100. But perhaps understandably, few politicians or bureaucrats are willing to advocate the obvious: the best air-con efficiency scheme is the ‘off’ switch, or at least a higher thermostat setting.

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 “YOU HAVE TO THINK DEGREES OF DIFFERENCE ABOUT THE LONG-TERM Depending on your air-con’s size, age and condition, OPERATING COSTS. YOU and your other habits of use, each degree higher you set the thermostat can save you 10-15% in ALSO HAVE TO THINK energy costs101. The whole-of-community grid load ABOUT WHAT’S A HEALTHY savings are the key gain, though – especially as GWS SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT. gears up for another scorching summer. 100,000 air conditioners, turned on together but set to 25°C HERMENEUTICALLY instead of 22°C, could spare the grid a surge equal SEALING A CLASSROOM to 125,000 simultaneously started hair dryers102. Taking this experiment further, if every air-con AND THEN CONTROLLING thermostat in Australia changed to this setting, TEMPERATURE THROUGH as a nation we’d pump 300,000 fewer tonnes of ARTIFICIAL MEANS IS BY NO greenhouse gas into our sky every year103. MEANS THE BEST WAY TO THE IMPACT OF OUR AIR-CON BUBBLE ENSURE THAT SCHOOLS ARE Our growing dependence on air conditioning is having COMFORTABLE…” other long-term effects. Our energy grids must be The Hon. Rob Stokes MP built to handle peak demand, however brief. This (Then) NSW Minister for Education105 means that the cooling surges of a relatively few very hot days each year require a ‘gold-skewing’ of our entire electricity supply chain, just to accommodate our air-con summer use. Pity those who don’t use it: equally shared grid ‘service’ charges mean they are effectively subsiding the average air-con user to the tune of about $350 a year104. Another hugely distorting effect of our ‘first resort’ to air conditioning for temperature control in our built environment is on our planning, design and construction choices. At precisely the moment we need to be moving to natural cooling (and heating) in our homes, shops and workplaces, we remain obsessed with building big fridges!

But perhaps the most insidious long-term impact will be on us: our physiology, health and resilience. For a people who live in one of the most mercurial climates in the world, now experiencing extremes that will surely worsen before they improve, seeking to seal ourselves inside a temperature-controlled bubble 24-7 is bound to end badly.

51 THE CHALLENGE: RE-LEARNING TO DEMAND THE TOOLS: GOVERNMENT RESOURCE MANAGE OUR ENERGY EFFICIENCY PROGRAM (GREP)

Across the fossil fuel century, electricity seemed to The NSW GREP provides the framework for the be in limitless supply. As a result, we’ve gradually public sector to lead the large-scale energy efficiency lost the capacity for voluntary energy efficiency and drive that is required to head off black-outs and the self-discipline. As our population expanded, and with need for preventative load-shedding during peak it our dazzling array of electronic gadgets, we simply demand days this summer. Combined with the kept generating more electricity supply to meet our scale of government-owned and leased real estate, rising demand. It’s worked just fine – until now, when aggressive target setting in the GREP framework electricity’s greenhouse emissions bill is coming due. is an opportunity to make a big difference without Until we’ve fully transitioned to low-carbon electricity, any major legislative or expensive supply side we’re going to have to take control of the demand interventions. side of the equation if we are to stave off the threat of summer black outs or preventative load-shedding. “E1: Target to save energy across all government While we do concede the role every energy customer sites: By 2023–24, all agencies must either must play in this, it is inescapable that prime implement energy savings projects at each of their responsibility both for our grid’s current fragility eligible sites, or achieve aggregate energy savings of and our failure to deal with it preemptively rests at least 10%... Agencies must create a plan… [to] be squarely with our elected leaders. Their collective, submitted… by November 2019 and include broad multi-partisan policy paralysis and intransigence in information on how agencies will achieve improved recent years on these issues is something all voters energy efficiency.” recognise. NSW GREP requirement106 Therefore, our recommendation takes primary aim at government, and calls for it to lead by example in THE START SITE: STATE AND FEDERAL lightening the load on our energy grid. GOVERNMENT OFFICE SPACES

“NSW Government agencies own and operate facilities and infrastructure that use about 1800 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity each year — or around 2.7% of NSW electricity sales. In 2016–17, the Government spent $265 million on electricity.”

NSW GREP explanatory notes106

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 THE WHOLE-OF-COMMUNITY PLAN

The Dialogue recommends that all public service office buildings operate with a minimum permissible air conditioner thermostat setting of 25° Celsius.

Political and policy NSW Planning, Industry and Environment departmental Secretary to add the leadership following to all clusters’ GREP plan submissions for 2019:

All Government buildings (as defined in GREP existing Target E2) are to adopt a minimum permissible thermostat setting of 25°C.

Equivalent directive to be issued by the relevant public service administrative authority to all federal government buildings.

Expertise to prevail Public sector staff to finesse directive details, to facilitate any OHS, staffing, technical or operational exemptions.

Private and NFP Political and public sector leadership, perhaps emphasised by a government sector co-operation publicity campaign, might inspire similar leadership in the private sector, and spark grassroots NFP ‘momentum-building’ campaigns. There exists great potential for powerful CSR leadership from other scale occupiers of Sydney’s air- conditioned high-rise offices. Our financial institutions, multinational corporations and major shopping centres could join in.

Our collective To really maximise the whole-of-community impact of such leadership, we’d all response have to get on board. As parents, as partners, as bosses or workers, we’d have to play our part in encouraging ‘by example’ our whole tribe to wean ourselves off the absurd ‘need’ we’ve developed – only in the last few years — to live our whole lives in a fridge.

No-one gets left If the rest of us turned our thermostats up just a little, those who really need a behind cooler room temperature – some of our elderly and our kids, the unwell and those who care for them – could still have it, without us all blowing the grid.

53 INVENTING THE GREEN UTILITIES 5 FUTURE

THE DIALOGUE RECOMMENDS THAT A GREEN UTILITIES R&D PRECINCT BE ESTABLISHED IN THE EXISTING INDUSTRIAL ZONE OF CAMELLIA

SYDNEY WILL NEED YEARS OF GREEN UTILITIES RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

The unstoppable armies of oil, gas, coal and plastics scientists, engineers and industrialists, who together furnished our world with brilliant things throughout the fossil fuel century, aren’t the bad guys in the unravelling story of Climate Change. Far from it. Together, their ingenuity and hard work made our lives better than ever before, and it is their ingenuity and hard work that will again take us forward, to a cleaner, greener future. A WHOLE NEW GREEN UTILITIES INDUSTRY

To help them do it we’ll need to create a vast new green utilities industry and economy, in the same way that fossil fuels created the new industries of the last century – oil and gas refining, energy harnessing and distribution, new fields in transport, and . It will demand a whole new green utilities workforce, new trade skillsets and research fields, new schools of education and vocational application. Our shift to green utilities will drive a disruptive expansion into areas of research and its application, that we have yet to even conceive. PLENTY OF GREEN UTILITIES INVESTMENT

It will take a lot of money and involve a lot of risky innovation. But the return will be immense. Investment in global energy in 2017 was US$1.7 trillion, with two thirds of electricity generation spending now focused on renewables.111 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that limiting global warming to its preferred target of 1.5°C will need the world to splash out US$2.4 trillion in decarbonisation spending annually, to 2035.112 Since 2013 over US$8 trillion in investment has been divested from the fossil fuel energy sector.113 Meanwhile the global waste-to-energy industry will grow to over US$40 billion by 2023.114

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 Engineers Declare107 It will be expensive for Australia to take a leading role in the world’s transition to the green utilities “ENGINEERS ARE UNIQUELY technology and systems of tomorrow. But the world is awash in cheap cash, looking for somewhere with PLACED TO MAKE A a real future to land. With Australia’s economy in SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTION danger of stalling, and our financial and industrial leaders increasingly united in their call for a bold TO TACKLING CLIMATE new phase of nation-building, not to invest would CHANGE, THROUGH THE be even more expensive for us all. Financially, PROJECTS WE CHOOSE environmentally, and in generational missed AND HOW WE CHOOSE TO opportunities. DO THEM, OUR TO CAMELLIA: THE IDEAL SITE FOR A GREEN SOLVE COMPLEX PROBLEMS, UTILITIES PRECINCT AND THE INVESTMENTS IN This year’s NSW Budget confirmed a confident ‘pro- RESEARCH AND INNOVATION growth’ government which recognises that economic success in an uncertain climate demands, not THAT WE MAKE.” retreat on nation-building infrastructure, but resolute 108 Peter Chamley, Chair, ARUP Australia advance. With its independent investment ambitions and growing population pressures, Sydney has great incentive to be especially proactive in green utilities transition and integration. The Dialogue regards an ‘urban-in-place’ precinct to be the ideal vehicle for such R&D leadership, and nowhere in Sydney is better suited for one than Camellia, within the Greater Parramatta and Olympic Peninsula115. “I’LL SAY IT AGAIN: IN A EXISTING INDUSTRIAL ZONE CARBON-CONSTRAINED The area’s eastern sections have an established WORLD, AUSTRALIA IS A history hosting light manufacturing, freight, transport WINNER. IT’S THE BIGGEST and petrochemical activities, providing the requisite planning, administrative and logistic characteristics. ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY FOR Surviving industrial in dense Sydney infill is OUR COUNTRY IN THE NEXT 25 rare, but crucial for generating local workforce up- skilling and micro-regional economic acceleration. YEARS. OPTIMISM EVERYONE. Camellia’s industrial status must not only be WE NEED TO LOOK FORWARD, retained. It should be revitalised and redirected NOT BACKWARD.” strategically, in accordance with the ‘use it or lose it’ Mike Cannon-Brookes, Co-founder109 principle.

55 “AUSTRALIA HAS THE CAMELLIA RESIDENTIAL MASTER PLAN AND STRONGEST INTEREST AMONG CURRENT USES DEVELOPED COUNTRIES The industrial area is both embedded within a wider residential and recreational context116 but IN THE SUCCESS OF A also sufficiently delineated to make light industrial GLOBAL EFFORT ON CLIMATE activity an unremarkable norm. An urban green CHANGE…[AND]…THE MOST utilities precinct spatially and functionally-integrated within precisely the dense urban setting that its R&D TO GAIN ECONOMICALLY outcomes are intended to serve is far preferable FROM BEING PART OF A to the isolated ‘’ model, often GLOBAL TRANSITION TO A unsuccessful due to contrived isolation from urban ZERO-EMISSIONS ECONOMY.” areas. Professor Ross Garnaut AC The prospect of government-procurement energy Superpower: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity110 offtakes to help upscale future RE or waste-to- energy pilot projects, for example to service the future Parramatta and Metro West stabling yards117, also adds weight to Camellia’s green utilities precinct case. Capping the argument, the area has “THE WORLD IS already proved its suitability with one such success DECARBONISING. WITH THE story. RIGHT PLANNING AND VISION, The Earthpower118 food waste-to-energy plant at AUSTRALIA CAN NOT ONLY Camellia, now run by Veolia/Cleanaway, is a well- established facility already providing electricity to CONTINUE TO BE AN ENERGY the grid with cutting edge technology. Since 2003 EXPORTING SUPERPOWER, this visionary and now thriving early-mover has been quietly harvesting Sydney’s food waste, anaerobically WE CAN ALSO ENJOY A NEW digesting it into methane for small, clean turbines. MANUFACTURING BOOM. THIS It has weathered feedstock contamination issues, MEANS JOBS.”120 global financial shocks, food and waste industry The Hon. , MP apathy, modular down-sizing and changes of Federal Opposition Leader ownership. But its tanks now digest 50,000 tonnes of food waste a year, from Woolworths, and many other sources. Its turbines are cleanly powering up to 6,000 local residences. And its bottom line is now deservedly green too, in profit since 2017 for its far-sighted investors.119

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 Earthpower’s Camellia success story represents a SPECIAL ACTIVATION ZONE? fine template for what a green utilities precinct on a larger, more diverse and ambitiously strategic scale NSW Parliament rejected the idea of Special could achieve there. Other key areas of investment Economic Zones in 2012 as unwieldy and and research it might attract include: unnecessary, but the focus then was on border disparities.126 To secure the international billions Hydrogen energy: This blossoming global industry needed, has the time come to reconsider the notion may be worth $155 billion by 2050, needing of using policy levers to entice it? For Camellia, 121 $25b annually invested to get there. The World attracting the world’s rapidly-expanding, multi-trillion Energy Agency Power to X report picks Australia dollar ‘decarbonisation industry’, as well as bringing as a future ‘hydrogen export giant’, and Chief the precinct’s existing landowners to the table, 122 Scientist Alan Finkel agrees. The CSIRO’s National might need special concessions from state or local Hydrogen Roadmap calls for a Hydrogen Centre of government, combined with direct public investment. Excellence.123 Why shouldn’t Sydney put in a bid for Camellia, with its fossil fuel legacy and centrality for THE CHALLENGE the requisite highly-skilled STEM workforce? Inventing Australia’s green utilities future. Thermal energy-from-waste: WA’s 36MW Kwinana THE TOOLS project will be (by 2021) Australia’s first thermal Treasury, DPIE, City of Parramatta, Universities and scale energy-from-waste (EfW) facility124. To date R&D assets, private investment. we’ve flatly rejected incinerating rubbish as fuel, not least in Western Sydney, killing off proposed projects THE START SITE at and Eastern Creek125. An urban green Camellia Industrial Zone. utilities precinct would help allay misconceptions and evolve the EfW social license, by starting at a smaller low-impact scale.

Distributed energy resource and prosumer grid integration, urban water nutrient harvesting, smart utility sensors and 5G communications interfacing are just a few other R&D strands that a unified, co- located, urban precinct could activate.

57 THE WHOLE-OF-COMMUNITY PLAN

The Dialogue recommends that the existing industrial zone of Camellia be designated a Green Utilities R&D Precinct and Special Activation Zone

Political and policy The NSW Treasurer and the NSW Planning Minister prepare a plan to designate leadership the existing industrial zone of Camellia as a dedicated Green Utilities R&D Precinct and Special Activation Zone (non-regional).

Expertise to prevail Treasury and DPIE to assist with getting right the balance of: • investment incentive and value-capture • public regulation and private autonomy • strategic oversight and individual flexibility • commercial risk and commercial return

Private and NFP If we build it, they will come: Australia’s — and the world’s — best green utilities sector cooperation scientists, engineers, project managers and financiers. To bring the Camellia Green Utilities Precinct to life.

Our collective Let’s support it and welcome them. The ingenious builders who’ll invent our green response utilities future.

A sustainable, prosperous and fair future, in which no one gets left behind.

WESTERN SYDNEY’S HOT ISSUE| westernsydney.org.au | December 2019 REFERENCES

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65 103. Graham B 2017 Setting your air-con to 25 this summer could save billions QT.com 19 Dec 2017 accessed 10 November 2019 https://www.qt.com.au/news/setting-your- air-con-to-25c-in-summer-could-save-b/3294383/ 104. Productivity Commission Inquiry Report 62 Electricity Networks Regulatory Frameworks 9 April 2013 https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/electricity/ report/electricity-volume1.pdf 105. As-then NSW Minister for Education, In interview with Brown C at Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue Out There! Summit 9 May 2018 Novotel Parramatta https:// westernsydney.org.au/out-there-2018 106. NSW Government Resource Efficiency Policy (GREP) 2018 https://www.environment. nsw.gov.au/-/media/OEH/Corporate-Site/Documents/Energy-savings-and-resource- efficiency/nsw-government-resource-efficiency-policy-180458.pdf 107. Engineers Declare Climate and Biodiversity Emergency website https:// engineersdeclare.org.au/ 108. Smee B 2019 Leading Australian engineers turn their backs on new fossil fuel projects The Guardian 21 October 2019 accessed on 10 November 2019 https:// www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/21/leading-engineers-turn-their- backs-on-new-fossil-fuel-projects 109. Twitter @mcannonbrookes 2:56 PM 1 November 2019 https://twitter.com/ mcannonbrookes/status/1190387045916499968 110. Garnaut R 2019 Wrong side of the chasm: Australian can still cross the bridge to a low-carbon world The Guardian 3 November 2019 accessed 10 November 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/03/wrong-side-of-the-chasm- australia-can-still-cross-the-bridge-to-a-low-carbon-world 111. International Energy Agency 2018 Global energy investment in 2017 fails to keep up with energy security and sustainability goals 17 July 2019 accessed 10 November 2019 https://www.iea.org/newsroom/news/2018/july/global-energy-investment- in-2017-.html 112. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report Global Warming of 1.5°C 2018 https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ 113. Go Fossil Free global divestment campaign as at 13 December 2018 https:// gofossilfree.org/major-milestone-1000-divestment-commitments/ 114. Wood J 2019 This Chinese Megacity is building a giant waste-to-energy plant World Economic Forum 1 July 2019 accessed 10 November 2019 https://www.weforum. org/agenda/2019/07/one-of-china-s-biggest-megacities-is-building-a-giant-waste-to- energy-plant/ 115. NSW Department of Planning and Environment Draft Camellia Town Centre Master Plan 3 https://www.planning.nsw.gov.au/-/media/Files/DPE/Reports/draft- camellia-town-centre-master-plan-planning-report-2018-02-09.pdf 116. Kembrey M 2015 Industrial wasteland of Camellia set to become new neighbourhood Sydney Morning Herald 16 July 2019 accessed 10 November 2019 https://www. smh.com.au/national/nsw/industrial-wasteland-of-camellia-set-to-become-new- neighbourhood-20150715-gicvdq.html 117. O’Sullivan M 2019 approval clears way for exact locations of train stations Sydney Morning Herald 18 October 2019 accessed 10 November 2019 https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-metro-approval-clears-way-for-exact- locations-of-train-stations-20191017-p531mc.html 118. Earthpower https://earthpower.com.au/

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