Botany Bay Chemical Plume

"If you're looking for a symbol of how things were done in the bad old days, then this would have to be it. On the surface, a carpark, but dig a little deeper and it's actually a toxic waste dump. Beneath me is 45,000 cubic metres of contaminated sand and ash." —Tara Brown, Australian reporter Botany Industrial Park in Sydney contained Australia's largest petrochemical plant for fifty years. Decades of poor practices at the plant, which was built by by Imperial Chemical Industries in the 1940s, contaminated the aquifer that flows into Sydney's Botany Bay with significant amounts (millions of liters) of mercury, chlorinated hydrocarbons, and other toxic chemicals. When the extent of the contamination became clear around the turn of the millennium, it had permeated the sandy soils beneath the site and created a "plume" of chemical groundwater pollution that was slowly moving towards the bay. As monitored since 2003 by the Environmental Protection Agency of New South Wales, Orica corporation—which now owns the plant—built a groundwater treatment facility in an attempt to gradually eliminate the pollution, while a "Groundwater Extraction Exclusion Area" was established in the contaminated area, prohibiting residential groundwater use. 15,000 tons of highly poisonous hexachlorobenzene remain stored by Orica onsite, awaiting safer permanent disposal in the future.