The Gladstone Industry Leadership Group (GILG) members have welcomed the release of the Clean and Healthy Air for Gladstone (CHAG) Interim Health Risk Assessment (HRA). Rightly, the overall HRA process holds Gladstone industry and other emitters accountable for their impacts on the quality of Gladstone’s air.

The Community Reference Group of the CHAG project is crucial to this accountability. This committed team of community members is instrumental in ensuring that the CHAG project answers the air quality questions of the Gladstone community.

While the initial results contained in the Interim HRA includes some good news for those concerned about the health of Gladstone’s air, more monitoring and analysis is required before we can know the full story.

Regardless of this, GILG members recognise that they need to continually improve their environmental performance. These GILG members are:

• Boyne Smelters Limited – Australia’s largest Aluminium smelter,
• Cement Australia – Australia’s largest cement kiln,
• NRG Gladstone Operating Services – Queensland’s largest power station,
• Queensland Alumina Limited – ones of the world’s largest alumina refineries, and
• Rio Tinto Alcan - Yarwun – the first green field alumina refinery built since 1985.

Community expectations of industry’s environmental performance continually evolve and so industry has to keep pace with these expectations by always looking for ways to improve.

GILG members accept that the right thing to do is to always strive to reduce the impact of their operations. One example of this is GILG’s recently launched Clean and Healthy Air Management Program. This employee improvement suggestion and feedback scheme is focused on reduction of industry air emissions and getting the most value from ideas by sharing them across all GILG member sites.

Overall I think that this interim assessment is a good start and begins to answer the question that the Gladstone community really wants to know,“What is the quality of our air?” However we must await the release of the final HRA before we can comprehensively answer this crucial question.

If you have any questions that you would like me to answer, please go to our forum topic at www.gilg.com.au.

If you would like to have your say on how GILG is going and don't know how, please click on this link which shows you how to register and make a comment, anonymously if you wish.

I look forward to hearing from you soon, cheers, Kurt.