Should Australia be turning its rubbish into electricity?

Harry van Moorst is a veteran community activist. In the 1960s, he protested against the Vietnam War. In the '70s and early '80s, he was active in the anti-uranium movement. In the '90s, he helped lead a successful campaign against a toxic dump proposed for Werribee, in Melbourne’s outer-western suburbs.

Harry van Moorst, from the Western Region Environment
Centre, believes residual household waste is better off
going to a waste to energy plant than landfill.CREDIT:

Van Moorst is exactly the sort of local warrior whom the proponents of a waste to energy plant feared could be a thorn in their side.

But instead he is a cautious supporter of the proposed plant.

The plan, by Recovered Energy Australia, would convert household rubbish (from the bins that go to landfill not recycling bins) into a gas that would generate enough electricity to power 20,000 homes.

Read the story by Jewel Topsfield from The Age - “Should Australia be turning its rubbish into electricity?”

The changing disease climate

Virus and bacterial diseases don’t appear out of nowhere, and most require a host to stay active, reproduce and evolve. Insects and other animals play a key role in this - around 60 percent of infectious diseases that affect humans are zoonotic – which means they’re spread from animals to humans.

Australia has never experienced a large outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.

But this is a pattern also true of 75 percent of new or emerging infectious diseases.

Tracking disease prevalence, spread and movement among populations of animals is the role of veterinary epidemiologists like Dr Simon Firestone, Professor Mark Stevenson and Dr Anke Wiethoelter at the University of Melbourne.

“A nice analogy would be that a traditional veterinarian’s client is a single animal; a veterinary epidemiologist’s client is the country and all the farms and animals in that ecosystem,” Professor Stevenson says.

Read University of Melbourne Pursuit story - “The changing disease climate.”