The Future History of Adelaide: Waste & Pollution

This ‘future history’ of Adelaide was based on ‘Los Angeles: A History of the Future’ (1982) by Paul Glover, and is written from the year 2136. It examines how Adelaide became an ‘ecopolis’ — an ecological city — over 150 years, reversing the damage done to the region since European colonisation began in 1836. At the time, there was a proposal for a ‘piece of ecocity’ in Halifax Street, whose features and design principles are referenced as the first fractal of this change. This larger scale proposal did not eventuate, but a smaller scale exemplar, Christie Walk, can be found in the CBD at 105 Sturt Street, Adelaide.

This was written in 1995 at university, as a directed study for history, and reflects my thinking, understanding, available technologies and references at the time. The Ecological Crisis of the 1990s is referred to as ‘EC’ and phrases like ‘200 years EC’ mean 200 years after this Crisis.

Image from The Circular Economy Wiki, adapted from Girardet

Waste & Pollution

The Kaurna, because they moved with the seasons and did not use synthetic materials, did not create a waste or pollution problem. Any refuse they generated simply returned to the natural environs, and as the Kaurna were dispersed and their numbers relatively few, their ‘waste’ did not build up.

There is no such thing as ‘waste’ in nature. The waste of one living thing becomes the life giving resource of another.

This ‘circular metabolism’ was shattered once the Europeans brought their habits to the Tandanya Bioregion. Initially, because numbers were few, problems were not apparent. But as early as 1848, The Observer published comments on the state of Adelaide’s water:

(Some people)…store their cellars full of stagnant fetid water, possessed open cesspools, dung heaps, butcher’s offal, decayed vegetables and crowded pigsties etc; and on their premises drank filthy, unfiltered water, leave their streets unpaved,undrained and uncleansed, and in fact do everything in their power to provide employment for the doctors and undertakers of the district.

(in Colwell & Naylor, 1974 pp50–51).

By 1856, the situation had obviously not improved; the Observer carried a letter to the editor which expressed disgust at ‘…glass bottles by the cart load…’ on the western side of Montefiore Hill, with ‘…old trousers rotting and producing nasty stinks, and other rubbish thrown there…’ (in Colwell & Naylor, 1974 pp50–51).

Urban Worm Farmers

Incredibly, little improvement was made overall by the time the Ecological Crisis hit over 130 years later! Adelaide’s water supply had improved — somewhat — but waste and pollution problems still plagued Adelaide. At the height of EC, there were big fights between local communities trying to halt plans for major landfill dumps in their area, although landfill sites dotted Adelaide to cater for the city’s waste, 1,000,000 tonnes annually at the time! (Altmann, 1994).

The ‘snapshot’ of Adelaide’s waste at the height of EC reveals how poorly waste problems were understood at the time. Organic matter comprised nearly half of domestic waste! This, as we know, is completely compostable, and returns nutrients to the soil. Many households did in fact begin to compost their organic waste before and during EC, but it wasn’t enough. Only after massive public education campaigns and a subsidy on backyard ‘worm farms’ via council rate reductions did Adelaide’s organic waste problem begin to dissipate.

Other forms of waste — paper, glass and metals — began to be recycled. This helped the situation enormously, and the highly successful container deposit legislation, introduced by the South Australian government in the 1970s, was extended during EC to include things like milk cartons, cardboard boxes and other recyclables. There remained a problem with other types of waste, however. Recycling eroded the waste problem to a great extent, and eventually much of the unnecessary packaging stopped being produced — after the manufacturers were made responsible for its recovery, reuse or recycling!

One of the most concerning waste issues is the radioactive waste dump established at Woomera during EC. The Federal government callously exploited its arbitrary rule over a small piece of South Australia, leaving us with a toxic legacy of nuclear waste, the half life of which will probably outlast our civilisation.

In the final analysis, we began to realise that unless materials could be absorbed back into the loop of ‘waste as resource’ — unless the city could work like the part of nature which it is — we could not produce these materials at all. Consequently, a whole new industry sprang up which researched and developed both ecologically sound manufacturing processes and organic based substitutes for synthetics, such as the corn starch plastics. This thriving industry is now one of the cornerstones of economic activity in the Tandanya Bioregion, successfully tapping into the creative talents of early innovators like Omnipol (now Advanced Plastic Recycling).

Licence To Spill

Pollution shocks also plagued Adelaide in pre-EC days, especially the level of air pollution for a relatively small — but excessively car-dependent — population. Despite the introduction of unleaded petrol by the State government in 1985 — which used benzene, a known carcinogen, instead of lead (Hoyle, 1995) — there were still concerns during EC about lead levels in the blood of Adelaide children, which resulted in an average 2–4 point IQ loss (Weir, 1995c). Not surprisingly, the areas along the main arterial roads of the time were where children were more likely to have high blood levels.

During EC, there were numerous sewage spills on coastal areas where the infrastructure could not keep up with development, and it was revealed that 50,000,000,000 (that’s fifty thousand million) litres of secondary treated sewage (ie. ‘mashed’ raw sewage) was flushed into St Vincent’s Gulf annually from the Bolivar Treatment Works! (Henschke, 1995). Four million litres of oil were unaccounted for by the South Australian EPA in the mid 1990s, when Australia was recycling 35% of its oil compared to 65% in the US and 85% in Germany (Henschke, 1995).

In 1994, the newly-formed Environment Protection Authority renewed more than 100 licences which allowed businesses and industries to discharge waste into the ocean. This discharge included petroleum, chemicals, sewage and heavy metals (Weir, 1994). This was supposed to have been phased out by 2001, but of course it wasn’t. The situation began to mirror that of the US, where wealthier businesses were simply able to buy the right to pollute, forcing smaller businesses out of operation — and the pollution problem persisted. Adelaide began to move away from this system of ‘tradeable pollution credits’ once three fundamental shifts in thinking filtered through our society:

Green Accounting

Because it was not protected through private ownership, the ‘commons’ (air, water etc) ‘belonged’ to nobody (despite the fact that everybody’s life depended on it) and no-one paid for its use and abuse. Once these costs (eg. the health costs of polluted air) were factored into the balance sheet, the picture began to change. Suddenly, it was cheaper to switch to those ecological methods and products which had been advocated by the ‘greenies’ of EC times.

The Precautionary Principle

Once this principle was adopted, the onus was shifted onto the polluter to prove that discharges were benign, rather than leaving the community to prove the danger — by which time the damage had been done. This counteracted the mindset of those unscrupulous businesses who thought they could pay to pollute, and all would be OK.

Ecological Loops

Once we began to abandon linear, mechanical thinking and adopted ‘circular’ ecological thinking, we could see clearly how we had to deal with our waste and pollution.

The city is not a machine which sits on the surface of the earth, it is a part of nature. The city had to adopt nature’s circular metabolism in order to survive.

References

Altmann, Carol (1994) ‘Garbage dumps war: residents unite to fight landfill plans’. The Advertiser, 16/10/94.

Colwell, Max & Naylor, Allan (1974) Adelaide: An Illustrated History. Lansdowne Press/Paul Hamlyn Pty Ltd, Dee Why West, NSW.

Weir, Leanne (1994) ‘Fears over ocean waste discharges’. The Advertiser, 24/9/94.

Weir, Leanne (1995c) ‘Lead shock sparks anger’. The Advertiser, 31/5/95.