Plans to dump dredged seabed into Great Barrier Reef scrapped

Plans to dump 3 million cubic metres of material dredged from the ocean floor into Australia's Great Barrier Reef will be scrapped by a multinational consortium, according to a recent report.

Image: JC Photo/Shutterstock

The consortium, including North Queensland Bulk Ports, GVK Hancock and the Adani Group, are developing the Abbot Point port, which is near the town of Bowen in Queensland. They had originally planned to dump the waste from their expansion of the Abbot Point coal terminal into the Great Barrier Reef - a plan approved by federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt late last year. Following an outcry from the public, scientists and environmental groups, plus a court case launched by the North Queensland Conservation Council, they now plan to dump the dredged seabed somewhere onshore.

"The fresh proposal will supersede Mr Hunt’s previous approval of dumping the material in the ocean under strict conditions and restart the process, which could delay construction,” Joanna Heath reports at the Australian Financial Review. "The details of the resubmission are not yet known, though sources played down the likelihood that a disused ­saltworks near the north Queensland town of Bowen could be used as a dumping site.”

So while we have very little information right now about where the new dumping ground will be, the good news is that it’s no longer going to be in the Great Barrier Reef. But it’s just one victory in a series of planned blows to the reef in the interests of commercial development.

“Onshore disposal of the Abbot Point dredge sludge would be a better outcome environmentally and for the tourism industry than dumping in the Reef’s World Heritage waters,” Greens spokeswoman for the environment Larissa Waters told the Australian Financial Review. “However, the environmental problems of increased shipping through the Reef and the export of millions of tonnes of coal to exacerbate climate change would remain.”

According to James Whitmore at the Conversation, scientists are now pushing for the consortium to rethink the entire dredging process, not just where they'll end up dumping the waste product. They say that even if the waste product doesn't end up in the reef, the sediment produced by ripping out the seabed will have a greater impact on its ecology than the developers have so far taken into account.

“These fine particles stay entrained in the water column and can be transported huge distances by prevailing currents. This transport opens up a large area of seafloor and associated benthic communities to potential smothering," Sarah Hamylton, a reef researcher at the University of Wollongong, told Whitmore.