Siting a hazardous waste facility: the tangled web of risk communication

Abstract

In 1990, the Australian government tried to establish a national hazardous waste incinerator in rural New South Wales. This paper considers the debates over the risks associated with hazardous waste incineration that emerged and the symbolic portrayal of technology implicit in these debates. Risk communications associated with technologies convey a message about how technological systems are shaped, implemented and operated. In this case, government officials succumbed to the temptation to employ an idealistic model of technology in an attempt to gain community acceptance for the proposed incinerator. They depicted incinerator technology as predictable and controllable, and separable from the social context. Opponents reacted by employing a `worse case' model; they represented incinerator technology as unreliable, uncertain and uncontrollable. Neither side deliberately lied: each put forward a view of technology that furthered its own goals. The polarized positions that resulted are not uncommon in technological controversies, and environmental groups are often branded as alarmist on this account. But there is some evidence in this case study that messages of reassurance also communicate insincerity and leave proponents of a technology vulnerable to having their claims easily deconstructed by the opposition.