28 October 2025 | FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Community groups opposed to the construction of incinerators will protest at a national waste expo in Melbourne on Wednesday [October 28] – angry that Victoria is embracing a technology increasingly being rejected internationally.
Melbourne’s famed Climate Choir will be there singing Drastic Plastic and Waste Not, Want Less andother ballads about rubbish and fire.
Legalise Cannabis MPs David Ettershank and Rachel Payne support the demonstrators, who will protest outside the Australian Waste Expo, including those from Sunbury in Mr Ettershank’s Western Metropolitan electorate. There are plans to build one of the state’s biggest waste incinerators in Sunbury that will burn three-quarters of a million tonnes of Melbourne’s garbage every year.
“It seems the Allan government is never afraid to try something old – waste incineration, just like we did in our backyards in the 1940s, burning rubbish in incinerators, but this is on a MEGA scale. It is literally a giant dumpster fire,” Mr Ettershank said.
“Why is Jacinta Allan’s solution to dealing with Victoria’s waste – Burn Baby, Burn?”
Incinerators close in Europe, as Victoria embraces outdated technology
Protest organiser Charles Street from Lara near Geelong said that Denmark was closing a third of its 26 incinerators, while Victoria was running headlong towards waste incineration, issuing 11 licences, whereas the other Australian states combined only had plans for seven incinerators.
“Burning rubbish in these colossal incinerators to create electricity produces the same amount of greenhouse gases for each unit of energy as coal power,” said Mr Street, a retired biochemist and science teacher.
“And burning waste like plastics releases halogenated dioxins and furans, harmful chemicals linked to cancer and compromised immunity, not to mention all the toxic ash they produce containing mercury, lead, and cadmium.”
Victoria fails to divert any waste from landfill
MP Rachel Payne said that in 2020 the Victorian Labor government committed to diverting 80 per cent of waste away from landfill by 2030 and 72 per cent by 2025.
“Want to know how much waste has been diverted from landfill in the past five years in Victoria? NONE,” she said.
“Legalise Cannabis Victoria pushed for and secured a parliamentary inquiry into hese incinerators that will need to be fed massive volumes of rubbish for decades.
“Meanwhile, in Europe, the EU has ruled that incinerating is environmentally unsustainable, making it harder for banks to invest in them.”
Mr Ettershank said the incinerators usually cost between $1 billion to $1.5 billion to build and multinationals had to pay a license fee.
“The Lara incinerator stopped by the EPA, was linked to the Chinese Government, while the Sunbury incinerator also has a Japanese backer and the mega waste transfer station proposed for Hampton Park is proposed by a French company – and the world’s biggest waste conglomerate, Veolia,” he said.
NSW ban incinerators in Metro Sydney
Alison Medforth from the No Sunbury WasteIncinerator Group said waste-to-energy incineration was a lazy and harmful policy.
“New South Wales has banned incinerators in metropolitan Sydney and only allows them in four outer regional areas, but Jacinta Allan has them dotted around Melbourne in a ‘Ring of Fire’ including one in Sunbury that would see hundreds of trucks using a small, narrow bridge – what a mess,” she said.
Jill Redwood from the Environmental East Gippsland Association said it was outrageous that the incinerators were not even required to be near rail hubs, meaning more trucks on Melbourne’s roads ferrying waste long distances to incinerators.
“Nine councils in Melbourne’s south-east have signed a contract to send their waste to an incinerator in Gippsland,” she said.
“The proposal was for waste to be compacted at a waste transfer station in the outer southeast of Melbourne, then loaded onto some 300 trucks that would travel 120km down the Princes Highway to the Maryvale incinerator every day. The waste transfer station proposal is now before the courts.
“And this idea grew out of the 2020 so-called Recycling Victoria Policy, what a joke.”
The Victorian parliamentary inquiry into waste-to-energy incinerators will report back in August 2026.
