 Hello everyone and welcome to Hydrotera's latest webinar. Today we're joined by Mark Taylor, Chief Environmental Scientist from EPA Victoria, and he's going to be talking all about measuring what matters in the community. We've got a great turnout for this one, so thanks very much for your time. Before we get started I would like to begin by acknowledging that we conduct our work across this great land and for that privilege we would like to thank the traditional owners. Hydrotera respectfully acknowledges the Boonwarang people of the Kulin Nation, where we are located today, and we pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging. There's a picture of Mark, a little bit about our presenter today. So Professor Mark, Patrick Taylor is Victoria's Chief Environmental Scientist at EPA. He is also an honorary Professor of Environmental Science and Human Health at Macquarie University. He has over 25 years of experience in his field with expertise in environment, geochemistry, environmental health, environmental forensics and citizen science. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters and has received numerous awards and recognitions for his research and teaching excellence. He is also a passionate advocate for science, communication and public engagement. What that formal introduction doesn't cover is some of Mark's other background. He's a geologist like myself. He studied Geography and Geology, which is a very important skill to have. He did his PhD focused on anthropogenic impact on sediments of the Pleiocene era. The geologist in the room, that will make some sense. In 1999 he came to Australia after having completed his studies in Wales. He's now at the University at Aberystwyth. How did I go, Mark? Did I sound right? No, I'm shocking. Aberystwyth. Thank you. It's fair to say that Mark is truly passionate about making sure science is useful and about sharing knowledge and making sure that that knowledge is applicable to what the community needs. And definitely in our chat before this it became clear that there's a real passion in. So we're lucky to have Mark here today. Before we get started. We love your Q&A. We would like lots of questions. We've already got 13 early bird questions, so that's fantastic. Thanks to those who sent them in. Obviously you'll have more questions as we go. And you do that by using the Q&A button at the top of your screen. Just type those in and I will read those questions out at the end, Mark. And we'll do our best to answer them. If we can't answer them today, we'll let you know that and do our best to get an answer after the webinar. Why does HydroTerra do this? We're passionate about sharing knowledge. We like to facilitate education. And we like to help industry by taking a bit of a leadership role in really bringing people together because that's when the magic happens. But without further ado, I'd like to hand over to Mark. Over to you, Mark. Thank you very much, Richard. Thank you very much for inviting me. And thank you to the 125, 26 participants who you've enrolled in. Appreciate the time. It's Friday. And we're all looking forward to the weekend to get back to what we were doing for pretty much the last month, which is enjoying the summer holiday period. So what I'd like to talk to today is a bit of a combination of some of the stuff that we do in EPA. But largely, like, why we would do it, you know, measuring what matters in the community. And I think what really excites me about talking about this stuff is because we can measure and do all sorts of studies and analyses, but the crux of science is our social license to be scientists and to show the value and the benefit of doing science for the general public. Clearly, many of us on this call, I would suspect are doing work as consultants or government agencies or even academics for industry. But there are industries, a small component of society. It's not unimportant. It's clearly important. It's clearly important that, you know, they are regulated appropriately, et cetera. But also to bring the community along about the value and benefit of science about why we would monitor what we would monitor for and what that all means. I think it's a really critical role. And I think the whole COVID epidemic was a really great opportunity. And I think it was graph to demonstrate the value and benefit of science of protecting public health. And so that's where I'm coming from, measuring what matters. So there are some things that we're doing. I'll talk about here that we do for the outreach for EPA. And then I'll talk about some of the fun stuff that I've done as a scientist. Some of the things that we all enjoy or we use, which you might find interesting. And then I'll come back right at the end. And I'll just go into the next slide because I think it describes what I'll cover. Oh, well, that's my major. Let's go on to the next slide. And then we come right back at the end. A new piece of work that some of you may have seen recently on the ABC. We're developing a distress index with the University of Adelaide to allow us to assess impact from pollution and waste on communities. At the moment, we can measure the physical emissions and depositions. But it's much harder for us to categorize and measure and assess harm to people. And our access, human health also includes psychological health. And we don't really have a tool or a mechanism to address it at the moment. And that last bit I'm going to talk about is about closing that gap. Okay, let's go on to the next one. So this is the EPA. So some of you will be super familiar. Some of you will be less familiar. But as you can see, EPA is made up of seven divisions, and we all contribute to the goal of EPA, which is to reduce harm and protect people from pollution and waste and reduce impacts to the environment and human health. You can see science sits next to legal. It doesn't literally sit next to legal, but it does in this graph. And we're enabling function to support the rest of the organization. We are critical in delivering innovative and targeted science advice to support strategy, policy development and strategic and operational decision making. We provide input to EES, major projects, for example, and also permission and licensing. And science underpins EPA's work. The board and the CEO and the government have been really clear that, you know, we're a science-led organization. And indeed, science is critical to pretty much every decision that is made that influences outcomes in the field, whether it's for the regulated community or the broader community. Let's go on to the next one. So science itself is made up of about 100 staff. We are like United Nations and it's fantastic. We have people from all over the globe. And I apologize to my staff if I don't catch it every place, but we've got people from the African continent, the South American continent. I think we've got people from the North American continent. We have people from several parts of Asia, subcontinent and Europe. So it's a really diverse community. Many of the staff have got higher degrees, but we have a lot of professors or PhDs. And in particular, some of our subject matter experts have been in the game for a long time. And I'm sure how many of you will know one of our most charismatic staff members if you do anything to do with air, which is Dr. Paul Tauray. I also have two fantastic deputies. I have Dr. Martin Denicamp, who looks after the public health branch and Dr. Jen Martin, who looks after environmental sciences. And I'll just come on to that structure in a minute. We have statewide monitoring networks covering, and I think we're the only EPA that has monitoring networks and programs that explicitly provide community. And maybe I've got that wrong, but we have a program in air. Nearly every EPA does air. All the sister organization and that's AirWatch. We do some stuff in water, which is around beach report, and we do some work down in the Gibson Lakes, but our beach report and Yarrow Watch are key touch points. Of course, we've got a team that goes out, does marine sampling, which feeds into deca's needs. And we also do, obviously, operations type stuff. But we've also got a soil program, and I'll touch on that a bit in this program. And we've done quite a lot of work in soil, most recently with respect to a new program called GardenSafe, which is a sort of a spin-off from Vegesafe, which I developed at Macquarie University and has been running for 10 years. I'll talk a little bit about that. And so we have these outward-facing programs covering air, soil, water that help the community execute their GED, the general environmental duty to minimize harm from adverse outcomes in the environment. We're also scientifically involved in pollution response. We also have with supporting and we make sure that the incident response vehicles and the staff are appropriately trained. So following the floods, we were able to uplift and upgrade vehicles so that every region has a response vehicle, which is pretty much geared out the same thing as the emergency pollution response vehicles. It's got onboard, in situ, testing and monitoring equipment. Effectively, it's the state of the art. And I'm proud to say, and I make no bones about dragging it, but I think we have the best equipped regional teams and also metro teams with our response fix because every one of those teams in the location have got a vehicle that allows them to respond to an incident in express time. And I think we're the only agency authority across the nation that has such gear. And we've also got laboratories where we're able to undertake in situ research and assessment. And one of the things that we developed since I've arrived is a portable XRF laboratory which helps support our garden-safe program that helps us join the floods. But it also helps us deal with other incidents or issues associated with mind contamination or legacy contamination. And I'm talking to an audience here who will know for well that the Goldfields, there are some challenges around arsenic and we'll be using our XRF equipment and capacity to understand what that means. And of course, science is involved in intelligence-gathering, modelling, intelligence-gathering meaning collecting data at a particular site and also undertaking modelling. We also have a citizen science team, preferably we like to call it community science where we do outward-facing work and we'll touch on that very briefly. That's the team. I'm supported by an amazing bunch of people. So whatever I do is really a reflection of whatever they do. And some people have been around quite a long time and quite experienced and particularly when we look at our teams when we come further down here in Airt, Odenois, McEarns, Land and Water Services, Dr Barry Warwick and Water Sciences Unit, Dr Carly Martino. They are long-termers at the EPA. They know how things work, they deeply experience and they give fantastic added value and support to the teams to help us execute that remit. I mentioned my two depages before. In addition to that, I've got a partnership leadership team which is run and supported by Carla Taddich and sitting under there, we have science services where we provide advice when it comes in from the call centre. And we also run a citizen science programme which includes a little bit of air monitoring on request, but largely around the garden-safe programme and we're probably looking at a new programme or we're looking at starting a new programme using EDNA with First Nations Groups. And of course, I've got a support office including Meaghan and Leander. So that's the overall look in science. So environmental sciences, what do we do? Well, the branch which is run by Jen Martin provides advice, information, we do publications as well and we've got KPIs attached to that and run programmes on air, odour, noise, land, groundwater waste, emergency contents and water sciences. It's an exhausting list of things that helps EPA meet the needs of us being a science-based regulator. Public health branch, really important because public health came over about six years ago post the Hazelwood matter into science and I think we're explicitly, I think the only EPA to have it in-house, we do share some things with health and we've got a memorandum of understanding who does what and we have conversations to make sure we're aligned. But we provide high quality information covering public health risks associated with chemicals, microbial risks and toxicology. It's also got an epidemiological component and risk assessment is a really critical part. Human health risk assessment is a really critical part of the work that the public health team provides. Next one. And I mentioned the science partnerships. The purpose of the partnerships is for us to have proactive science. We reach out, maintain our partnerships with key end users and key science producers. That includes CRCs, CSRO, universities and the like and including also government agencies, other government agencies in Victoria. The team is important in providing science advice. That's the science advice service running citizen science projects and building those relationships with the community so that people can understand what we're doing, why we're doing it and how they themselves can act to better protect themselves. And some of the work that we do also supports a record of decisions. The three main services are listed at the bottom. So what's happened in the past since we got a new act? No, we can skip on from that slide. I think people can read that. Thanks for tuning. So we had a new act in 2017 and we're now just over 50 years of existence. And the new act really allowed us to change the way we approach, from rather end of pipe, which is a typical approach that EPAs apply, dealing with the pollution at the end of the pipe or the boundary. We were able to go up to the front end upstream rather than downstream. And the focus very clearly is on prevention rather than rehabilitation. And we require everybody actually as part of the general environmental duty to make sure that prevention is a key component of all of their activities. We make community central to preventing harm and we use data that absolutely fundamental can't make a decision without data and it helps us give us the best state of knowledge. I've worked really hard with my team or probably more correctly, my team of works really are with me to try and put the authority, the capital A back in science. And a good example of that work is during the floods. Now, don't if you remember the floods in 2022, EPA for the first time really were called out to respond to the floods. Of course, we've done emergency response before with the bushfires, but we've never really done floods before, sent the team out to collect samples and placing us as being the authority looked a little bit like this. So during that whole period of time, we actually went out and collected data. We reported on that data, we collected samples at people's home in terms of the sediments that we deposited. We had an uplifted program. We made our beach record all year round and we did additional sampling in regional rivers. So we could inform the community what was actually in that water. And we have a significant piece of research which is being finalized about the 700 plus chemicals that we looked at in the flood waters. But what the outcome of us taking that more proactive step and being on the front foot, collecting samples and using the samples to provide the evidence and guidance to the community was that the media only came to EPA to say, hey, what's going on with the floods? What are the risks in my previous life when I was a professor at Macquarie University? I did find that there were times when EPAs wouldn't take that proactive approach and put themselves in front of the media so there was a void and that would then be filled by a university professor who might not really know what's going on in the back room of EPAs and what the data they're collecting, what the challenges and nuances are. But by our team being out in the front foot, media pushing us as being the key point source to come and talk to us, the authority, it really kind of changed the narrative. So just stay on the queue. Go back, Richard, please. So science really does support all of these aspects of what we call our regulatory queue. But we have, you know, the bits where we're significantly the focus around is the inform and educate we help set standards and guidelines and we support operations and permissions into comply. And of course we're also involved in monitoring and compliance. And so, you know, that's the, that's the, not entirely, but that's the focus of the work that we do in science. We're an enabling function. We support the other parts of the organization in order to allow us to execute our remit to better protect the environment from harm. Richard, next slide, please. So some of the work that we do, and I'll whip through these, just, just, it's a flavor. You know, this is kind of these sort of webinars that can have an infomercial. So I'll just talk about briefly some of the work. So on the left-hand side, we have beach report. Everybody can sign up from that to get text messages each day about the quality of the beaches. We monitor 40 locations in Port Phillip Ray and also including the Yarra, there's four on the Yarra and there's 36 around the bay. And we, at the moment, we do two reports a day, 10 o'clock, three o'clock. And it helps people understand which beaches may be good to go to, better to go to than others. And as you would all know, you're all scientists, you all get it. You know, the bay is usually in poor water quality condition when there's rainfall, which causes pollutants upstream. There's a stormwater pollutants that could be from the gardens or further upstream, agricultural lots or industrial sites flushed into creeks, which get flushed out into the bay. And typically, you know, the water quality is worse, closer to outlets into the bay. And typically, as you can see from this example, the more distant you come from the main sources, such as the Yarra, you see in the Maribanong, the water quality improved. So what we see is within 24 to 48 hours of being rain event, it's beach quality improving. And that's available. We do that all year. Since the floods of 22, we went from a sort of seasonal program to an all year program, and that's really valued by the community. We have a garden-safe program, and I mentioned this before. It's a little bit different to the veggie-safe program. We measure soil contaminants, but it also includes some nutrients, such as phosphorus and potassium in the soil. But we also look at soil quality indicators, such as the composition of soil and grain size, as well as trace elements. Since the science team or the community science team supports that, we've also been able to use that program to give some insights for research and development about focusing on understanding sources and causes and does the outside contaminants get in the inside. We've recently done a piece of work looking not just at trace elements, but also looking at a range of other, you know, typical urban contaminants, pesticides and paint fast, for example, PAHs, and the presence of those in veggie patches, front yard and indoor dust, and to see what the prevalence is and what the relationship is to outdoors. And the good news is that really the primary risk that we've identified in that study is trace elements, and we knew that they were a problem, and particularly in the older, more industrial areas of Victoria. And same sort of data and outcomes that we've measured in the veggie-safe program, which has been to more than 12,000 homes. So far, within less than just over a year, visiting 1,000 homes in Victoria has been a fantastic outcome. And the program will be covered on ABC Gardening. I think it's next month. I don't quite have the date. So watch out for that. It's a great coverage for us for EPA. It's a really super positive program. It's free to engage, send you to a landing and you get a report back. And of course, and on the right side, we've got AirWatch. Over 50 sites across the state, you know, the populous metropolitan and regional sites are covered. We use that data to help us understand what potential risks are, to put out any warnings where they may be the case. We use a mixture of equipment, going from sensors to more standard now-recorded equipment, such as high voles, in particular areas, which we then use for NEP and reporting. But the data's available online for the community. You just go on to the website. You can look for your location and find the nearest available air monitor and have us, you know, obviously ascertain what the air quality is over the last 48 hours. And all of that data gets pushed up onto Data Vic. Next slide, please. Before we move on, Mark, the Gardening Safe Program, are you using that data to make any modifications to the sort of ordered overlay side of things? So when we did this program, we knew noted in role if it meant they would be subject to receiving duty to notify. We've taken a duty to manage approach and we give people guidance about if you saw us contaminated or the things that you can do. We've not completely closed the door on going a bit further where we find really significant problems, but that hasn't arisen. And the answer is no, not explicitly, but we are doing some work up in the Goldfields region to help us better understand the distribution of arsenic legacy contaminants up there. We're actually about to start a piece of work using remote sensing data to try and ascertain the distribution of legacy contaminants across the Bendigo area. We've done some sampling in that area to set the natural background levels and have a look then. And then also look separately, look at what's the contamination, the levels of contamination, the pink sand, the gray sand waste and natural soils. And then what's the bioavailability of all of those? So the answer is no, not really. It's a focus program, but there's some intelligence about the prevalence of contaminants in different parts of the state and what those contaminants look like. And needless to say, it's primarily lead. We know that from other work that we've done. We expected that. That's from lead paint used on the buildings and lead gasoline because those emissions become depositions. Those depositions accumulate and don't go away. Does that help? Perfect. Thanks, Mark. I've never been told in perfect. So, and I already mentioned, we've got regional incident response vehicles. Super proud of that. It's a fantastic uplift for EPI. It just gives us the best quality gear to allow us to intervene and assess as soon as possible. So it allows us to take action based upon information. It allows us also to do better targeted sampling so we can do screening stuff. And here we've got sample capacity for gases and water and also some sediment stuff. So as you can see, and then the second one is we use those vehicles to help support and some of the approach in there to support our flood response work where we collected a massive number of contaminants, seven and 80 contaminants over 18 sites. We also did some work in individual residents' home. We opened the door. We used a garden-safe platform which would already develop to help impacted residents, particularly in the Maribanong area, but actually it was more. It was across all of the government's areas that were impacted to send in samples if they so choose. The flood response data isn't out yet, and we haven't finished it. We're still in the business of compiling it, as you can imagine, with seven and 80 contaminants. And all the other work we have to do, it's taken a bit of time, but I've looked at a draft that made comments and it's gone back to the team. And then the third bit of work that's going to allow us to respond to events whether natural or unnatural. And our focus is typically around unnatural industrial pollution events. Is this gap that I identified and mentioned before is psychological health? Our access to human health includes psychological health. And when I landed at the EP, I went, hmm, that's interesting. I've been thinking about this problem since I went to the American Geophysical Union meeting in 2015. And there's an opportunity here, I can see, to try and close that gap. So we've been working, and I'll talk about this later, with the University of Adelaide to develop the Environmental Distress Index, or TEDI. So what we'll be saying is, when in distress, grab your TEDI. Tell us how you're feeling, where you are, and we can then use that information to better guide and direct interventions and support, provide that information to other agencies or perhaps better still, other agencies can use this tool, and that's ultimately the plan. Next slide, please. And that's not quite worked out the way I'd like it to work out with that overlay. That must be swapping between Mac and Windows. So we undertake quite a bit of applied science research. On the left, my colleague in public health, Antimikinin, has been doing quite a lot with Jen Martin, quite a lot of work looking at PFAS in cattle. And a significant amount of research, we've published that work. I should have put the link into the paper. You can find that. You should be able to find that. There's a link right at the end, and you'll be able to find the paper and it's publicly available. And what Antim's done, he's looked at ways of changing on-farm management to manage the PFAS levels in cattle. And this is not a solution, but this is a management intervention approach to allow farm owners to still produce stock that's going to minimize and hopefully, probably not totally eliminate, but significantly minimize PFAS concentrations in stock that are going to go to market. So have a look at that study. The second bit of applied research that we're doing, and this has taken quite a long time to get there, is estimating stock, tire stock piles. Now everybody would know that waste tires are a problem and the proper situation that we have is authorized officers have to count the number of tires to ascertain if it's above or below the 5,000 tire threshold, which is the maximum of tires we allow to stock pile. Now I've never counted 5,000 tires, but I might be doing that sooner rather than later, because we have a piece of work that we need to do, but it takes a long time. And so we've been working with Macquarie University to develop a model and on that figure that you can see there, that's just a bit of a laboratory grace model using scale tires in the laboratory to look at the relationship between the volume and the number of tires. So it's quite easy for us to assess the volume. There's a couple of ways of doing it. There's the authorized officer method of pacing it out and doing an estimate and then we can use drones. So ultimately what we need to do is go out in the field, do tire piles. We're planning to do from 500 through the 7,000 to develop the linear regression so we can say the volume that we've measured here equates to this number of tires, which will save our staff having to count 5,000 plus tires. And so that's a piece of work. We actually went out to market to get somebody to move the tires recently. We haven't found anybody yet to do that work, but hopefully I'm going to solve it soon. And so we're working with Macquarie to build that model because there is no... There is the cal tire method, but that got bounced in court because there's no evidence to demonstrate that the volume calculations that they've used have been underpinned by some research. So we're closing that gap. And then on the right-hand side here, we've been doing some pretty cool science. We've been looking at using a variety of species to understand the prevalence of contaminants in the environment and how mobile they are. We've done some work with earthworms, with Melbourne University, and what that means in terms of uptake in soils along, again, more link with Macquarie. It's harked back to my relationship with them, but knowing the right people to do the work. Been using sparrows to look at the mobility and presence of pay-fasting birds. And we know that birds are a really good biomonitor because it's from a piece of work that I've done with the key researcher there, which is Matt Gillings. He's a PhD student associated with EPA. We've done some work at Broken Hill and we show that blood-led levels in sparrows mimic very closely those in children. And we know that because we've actually got measures in children, measures in sparrows, and they're all spatially aggregated. And there is a preprint publication online that you can find. And that article has now gone to Environmental Science and Technology for review purposes. And of course, we've also used, I've done several studies as have other my colleagues done studies looking at European honey bees as biomarkers to pollution. I recently published a study, two studies, one with my colleague, Cara Fry looking at trace metals and anti-merico-resistency bees and using those as a biomarker. And then secondly, a study from Namir where we looked to, you know, can do bees reflect the emissions from the Doni Ambo Smelter, which is located in the middle of Namir. And does that pose a risk? And we separated that. We did a study looking at soils and dusts. And then we did a separate one looking at bees. And, you know, pretty clear that dust is a much better indicator than soil. And bees also are a pretty clear indicator and are as good as measuring soils. But the best thing about bees is you can go to a limited number of hives dispersed across and away from a point source to assess contaminants. And I've done similar sorts of work also in Sydney and Broken Hill in relation to bees. And so we've used it in this case to look at emerging contaminants and look at the failed and transport. And we're asking that question, can we use bees as a really good bi-monitor for urban pollutants? And I'll foreshadow the answer. I think the answer, yes. I'm doing the next slide on my end which clearly doesn't work. Sorry, I forgot to insert the URL here but our science roadmap is now available online. Apologize for not putting in the URL. If we're going to distribute these slides afterwards Richard, maybe we can update that. So we've done a significant piece of work in science to really pull together what our science purpose is and to identify the focus areas for science. And ultimately the purpose of science is to deliver regulatory impact. We're also highly focused on making sure that we invest in our people. That's always a challenge whether it's through L&D or opportunities to work in different areas whether it's in government or within the EPA so that their skills and knowledge can be uplifted and stay current to the issues. And we are actually very focused on ensuring that we are addressing issues now but we're also preparing ourselves to deal with issues into the future and I'll give you a good example of what we're doing in the future issues. Most of you would know that wastewater treatment plants are regulated for a standard suite of contaminants but they're not really assessed for emerging contaminants that we know that are present in pharmaceuticals personal care products make up and a variety of other contemporary chemicals and these are less well treated in wastewater to standard wastewater treatments and bed filtration treatments versus reverse osmosis wastewater treatment plants and so we've done a piece of work looking at the prevalence of those and we've published that online you can find that online just google emerging contaminants wastewater you'll find that report online. And so we're really looking at the prevalence of those and we've done a separate piece of work looking at how do they pass up through the food chain and we've done some work looking at it's not ready yet but we've done some work looking at the reuse of or the use of water downstream of an effluent plant for irrigating crops and how that how any emerging contaminants and move through that system. So we try to keep ourselves abreast of contemporary issues and legacy issues but prepare ourselves for future issues so as you all know and this will be no surprise everybody we all kind of got caught out by faith us around about 2015 we all kind of knew it was happening but you know the Oki and the William town rather really caught many scientists and regulators out because we weren't we weren't across it really in the same way as the states and we had a huge amount of effort and none of us want to be in that position again and largely we're in the same position around microplastics you know the microplastics were well and truly out the bag before we really had our attention focused on it and so by staying abreast of future issues allows us to be better prepared have a look at the roadmap it's available for you to contemplate I think it's only about there's a top and tail of a page but it's basically three pages and all I can say is it took an enormous amount of effort to get rid of it down from 40 pages down to down to three which is really sort of distill what we're all about next slide please before we do Mark so with your roadmap process you're trying to cover a lot right now do you try and rank these based on your current understanding of the biggest risk to the community and the environment yes so that doesn't sit in the roadmap that sits in our priority of harms because clearly and we've done we do scanning work to look at what the risks are etc and obviously there's a list longer than a Macquarie dictionary of stuff in the environment that we could deal with so if I was to summarize it in simple terms make decisions around basically where we can get our biggest bang for buck where we can have the biggest impact because we cannot it is just physically not possible to address every single pollution item or issue so we really use a risk based assessment to ascertain what's the broad risk is it within our remit and do we have the capability and remit to actually tackle those problems and where we're going to get the most effect and so that's where we that's how we make a decision and our priority harms are listed on our website but also you can see within our strategic plan it talks really about what our goals are what we hope to achieve and sitting under there there's our annual plans that help us focus our work and why do you ever get community funding to supplement your core funding for programs like the Baywatch and that sort of thing What do you mean community funding? Like I guess what I'm looking for I guess open source funding you know like you might run a program to like we get quite a few inquiries from people who want to stick their own senses on polls because they swim in the bay every day so there's obviously people willing to spend the money have you ever tried raising money supplemented to get a broader coverage Yeah I think that's a bit that then becomes it's a bit of a tricky space for us we can receive money from obviously from government and other major government grants and we get on to you know partner in ARCs and CRCs but we wouldn't go out and do fundraising like that I'm depending because you've got this aspiration of there's science for community and then there's a whole bunch of people in the community that would like to fund that science and currently maybe there's a bit of a barrier there just something to think about I'll move to the next slide now So this is a brief summary of how we stay connected to other expertise we're involved in CRCs as I mentioned before we involved in ARC linkage programs and some ARC discovery programs and a variety of other projects in ESP and NHMRC we're involved with ICAMS and Health and the National Chemicals Working Group and we have significant involvement in the design and updating of the NEM we're also involved in with HEPA the CEO attends HEPA every time they meet and I can't remember the frequency I apologize I think it's a bit less than monthly it's quarterly and since I started in May 2023 we had we had all the EPA science teams from New Zealand and Australia come to Melbourne and to help us figure out how we can better work together how we can harmonization across jurisdictions and how we can really share resources and knowledge and most of my surprise this is the first time that all EPA science has come together and since that time we are providing advice to HEPA and building some action plans to help give them some support and insight on areas of focus that really reach across jurisdictions and one example of that is emerging contaminants every state dealing with it and also the circular economy and we're meeting this month to finalize those action plans and obviously we like to attend conferences not only because conferences are finally get to talk to all of you out there but we also get to talk a bit about some of our science but also importantly hear about what other people are doing and why they're doing it and get a feel of what's happening in the community and new insight so I think it's a really important part of our L&D next slide so I'll whip through a few things here measuring science that matters to my career has been lived by doing tons of fun things and it's been an absolutely fantastic journey and here are some of the things that I've looked at, bees, backyards chickens, drinking water red wine, wildfires and blood and PFAS levels blood lead and PFAS levels in firefighters and I'll just quickly whip through some examples of that so we did a study eight years ago looking back I think it was 2018 looking at honey and we want to use honey as a marker for trace elements contamination in urban areas and also looking at the transfer from legacy contaminants into bees into honey and we also as part of that work we looked at we collected a hundred honeys from around the world and we wanted to include in Australia, we wanted to ascertain could we use trace elements and this is a piece of work with the National Management Institute and we used trace elements to understand the source and location of those honeys and in doing that work we had to ascertain if the honeys were authentic and it turned out that about 20% of Australia's honeys and nearly 30% of global, the global sample that we took were not authentic and we identified that using the carbon acids 13, 12 method and we showed that there was too much sugar in the honeys and they were not coming from pollinated flowers but more from sugar beet for example and sugarcane, non-plouring C4 plants not C3 and that caused a bit of a storm and I'm proud to say we're covered on the front page of the Herald, Sydney Morning Herald and also the age and it was a great storm it was a fantastic piece of work that my PhD student which I obtained did at that time so that's a really important piece of work because if you're buying honey in the supermarket you want to know that it's honey it's not honey mixed with some sugar because obviously a kilo of sugar is a ton cheaper than a kilo of honey and so I think that's the problem when we get led to dilution of an authentic product with a non-authentic product and that led to some changes in the industry which was a great outcome next one and another piece of work that we did and he's now at New South Wales EPA, what we did was we collected a 60 year record of red wine from McClarenvale to acetane does that wine really represent atmospheric chemistry so we knew when it was bottled so we had an idea when it was grown we tried to make sure the wines weren't blended or mixed from different regions and what we wanted to know was does the wine reflect atmospheric chemistry over time and so on the right hand side here we have got the solid line without any dots on it, that's the leaded petrol and we did a piece of work Louise did a piece of work calculating emissions from leaded petrol over time looking at the sales and looking at the concentration of lead and we can see over time that leaded petrol emissions decline we then also looked at if you look at the if you can see it the squares on it, that's the air lead concentration in Adelaide and then the other line the maroon line with the circular dots that's the concentration of lead measured in South Australian wine and you know it's simple to say you can see that all of these things are related, there is a very clear pattern it's never going to be perfect, these are environmental samples but you can see when lead emissions decline from vehicles you can see that lead emissions as you would not be surprised, lead emissions in the atmosphere decline and that's also paralleled by declines concentrations in red wine and suffice to say if you look at the concentration in wine you can see really it's really only after about 2000 the late 90s and early 2000s that the concentration of leaded wine falls below the Australian drinking water guideline of 10 micrograms per litre so if you got any older wine somebody said to me what do you do with that I said share with a friend and on the left hand side here you can see the lead isotopes and look I'm not going to try and explain this in the time that I've got but what we were able to show is there was a shift over time from the composition that we measured in the air and also in the wine going from unnatural limit leaded gasoline through to more natural isotopes which match the soil and basically that confirmed the graph on the right we showed that during the peak of leaded gasoline emissions which contain typically broken hill lead that the lead in the wine matched the lead in the air and we can see as we reduce the lead emissions to the environment the composition of the lead the isotopic fingerprint became more natural over time so and needless to say I didn't get to drink any of the leftover wine I chose not to do that I know some will probably think about what happened to a lot of spare wine because clearly you don't need to use a whole bottle can we go to the next one and then I've really mentioned about bees and honey already so I want to wax lyrical here but I'm really proud so we were the first people others were doing it we were the first people to publish the use of lead isotopes in honey bees and honey we picked the Canadians and some people in Europe on this but what we were able to show here is if you look on the right hand side here I'm not going to get into the detail on the left but on the right hand side is our lead isotope diagram 06 over 07 on the vertical axis and on the horizontal 08 over 07 you can use any combination of the isotopes these ones are more common isotopes using quadruple ICPMS previously we done some work looking at Sydney aerosols which is that envelope the orange envelope in the middle and then in the middle of that there are a variety of samples which cover bees the honey the wax and also local soil and dust and what we showed was that the bees the honey the wax for example it looked very similar to or fell within the envelope of the leaded gasoline period although we were like 20 years past the major point of emissions what that tells you is the lead that was deposited during the peak leaded gasoline period is being remobilized and recirculated into bees and honey and wax and we were able to identify a very similar thing in Broken Hill the lead signature was much clearer in Broken Hill very like the Broken Hill lead and you can see that overlap in the bottom left-hand corner the top right is more the natural background samples they correspond background samples look like the background soil but the interesting thing is that the leaded gasoline that was emitted and deposited during the peak period it's still present and it's still being remobilized into biota clearly into our food systems however don't panic the contaminants are largely in the bees and not in the honey there is a tiny bit in the honey but basically the bees have it and sampling the bees is a much better use for biomonishing than actually sampling the honey but I don't want to get on the left it's too complicated people are going to need to study that's the next one have you been using humans through directly with blood samples to just look at what we're absorbing we've done a bit of that work but that's more around in Broken Hill maybe that's on one of the next slides there you go there's your answer we did the longest and largest study of blood lead in Australia it was about 25 years and about 25,000 data points and we assessed the relationship between proximity to the in the bottom left hand diagram proximity to the operations which is the brown hashed area and blood lead although this diagram doesn't particularly show it which shows the diagram a bit like measles the values which are both this is a 2020 blood lead concentrations and we've got a time series and there's a video somewhere it's somewhere online you can access it that I did 5 minute video telling the story 25 years story of Broken Hill there's a link at the bottom we can see a Broken Hill the concentrations are typically when you do the analysis they are worse closer to the mind the more distant but you can see from that map on the bottom left no place in Broken Hill is safe from elevated lead exposure in kids you can see red dots and orange or dark brown dots scattered right across Broken Hill up to 4Ks away from the line of load and that shows you how easily dispersed lead contamination is the diagrams on the bottom what these show you is on the bottom left hand side it shows you the rise of blood lead in a child and it shows you it rises inextricably from 0 up to about 18 months of age and then tends to plateau and that's because as kids age they start moving around and they start to get exposed to dust on the right hand side they are able to separate indigenous and non-indigenous kids and largely it's the same until about 12 months of age and then we see a separation of risk between non-indigenous and indigenous kids and we don't actually really know the reason it's probably to do with people's behaviors and where they play etc which might increase their exposures and then I reckon the killer diagram is up here in the middle of the XY plot with the little inset in the top so the inset in the top shows blood lead in kids plotted against lead production rates and you can see I can't actually really see it Richard I'm afraid but I think the correlation it's about 0.8 correlation between blood lead and lead production and when you distill that over a time series in the middle the red line shows the declining over the last 30 year period and the blue line shows you a reduction in production that rhymes didn't realise it wasn't intentional and so what this tells us is that production activities are really important in driving kids blood lead and that's because production equals lead in air and I've got a separate diagram which I haven't shown here that lead in air really relates is very strongly related to kids blood lead it's the same thing during the leaded gasoline area where a lot of dispersed sources presents a risk of harm what goes up comes down what goes down can get into kids hands which can get into kids bodies and elevate blood lead that's a very quick story of 25 years next slide you think given that we're quite obsessed with soil and contaminated sites and things but things that sound like having sort of driven repulsing more than so we ask that question we've asked that question is it soil or dust and short of going to a long-winded discussion it's clearly driven by dust and we demonstrate that in a couple of studies dust soil is important because it provides a reservoir for the dust but dust lead is really is the critical aspect because if you look at that diagram on the bottom left down here when kids blood lead is rising between 0 and 12 months of age kids between 0 and 6 months of age they're in the cot or they're on mum they're not rolling around in the garden dirt they're just not so how do they get leaded they get leaded from emissions which become depositions and it's falling on the hands or the mum's clothes or the mum's breast and the kids ingested it it cannot be soiled directly it can be indirect which means in a place like Broken Hill you must remediate the ongoing emissions to the environment and we know the remissions but you must also address legacy sources in people's garden you cannot do one without the other does that help? I reckon I'm going to run out of time here but we did another study looking at backyard soils and leaded chickens and what we showed was in order to keep the lead concentration in egg lead below 100 micrograms or 100 parts per billion soil lead needed to be nearly 1 third the HIL guideline at 170 there's no standard for egg lead so we used this proxy of 100 which others have used and it was used in Europe in a couple of places before but essentially we were able to show very clearly that in order to keep egg lead egg lead below a reasonable concentration of 100 pvv soil lead needs to be much lower and that actually is really important in helping people understand where they should keep chickens or what they should do in terms of remediating their yards because we've shown a significant amount of information in relation to soil lead concentrations in people's backyards and that's all published information and that's literally thousands of samples I think there's about 10,000 samples from Sydney and about 6,000 from the Melbourne area results are the same next one let's go on let's not do this because let's just finish because I know I can see we're running out of time and people have other jobs to do unless you want to talk about the PFAS because people like PFAS I put a lot of questions lined up as well Mark are you able to go for a couple more minutes so we did a study looking at the PFAS in firefighters supported by the Metropolitan Fire Brigade now known as Fire Rescue Victoria which is a randomized control and trial gold standard and we looked at the efficacy of giving a phlebotomy giving of plasma and blood to reduce PFAS levels and essentially what we showed those who gave plasma and they gave it more frequently than blood because they could reduce PFAS levels PFAS levels but particularly PFAS levels which is the primary contaminant in firefighters it was about 10% decline in people who gave blood so it was less efficacious but people gave a sample every 12 weeks whereas the plasma was every 6 so the frequency was different we ran the trial over and you can study the open access so you can read it nothing group so you can see the observation group there was no change you can see there was a significant change in the blood and the plasma donation it was the world first trial to do this piece of work and we were the first time we could show that there is a possible treatment for removal of PFAS from people there are other people looking at the use of cholesterol type drugs as well but you know cholesterol type drugs have got other adverse effects but this works and we gave evidence about this to the senate of one of their several inquiries about PFAS next slide I don't want to talk about microplastics if it's the next slide now move on we've got no time for that I just want to finish on this last one so go to the next slide don't really want to get into this there's a significant impact from doing science that matters for people whether it's in drinking water whether it's people's garden soils and other impacts when it's associated with talking or doing community based science or retail sciences and it's resulted in multiple media discussions for me and being fantastic discussions about getting out why science matters what you can do about it and all I can say is I encourage people to do more because it really engages people it helps build that social alliance for talking about social licence about talking about and using science to better a protection from pollution waste for both environment and public health let's go on to the Teddy finish off very quickly on Teddy so we have done a review of instruments using a scoping review method and it was led by Professor Eric and other colleagues Christine Peters, Cynthia Barlow, Mary Forbes Megan and Amy and myself that worked on this project and the study is available if you go to the next slide that go to the next slide please the study is available online you can read that study and that really stimulated a piece of work that we're now doing ABC ran a story on it this week we'll go to the link and have a look at that because the next slide what we then did once we've done the scoping study and we realised that we knew that anyway from the media there was a significant increase in psychological impacts from fires industrial fires, natural fires, flooding and other environmental impacts and we identified that some of the primary issues were depression anxiety, general mental health and distress and so on to the next slide what we've done is we responded to recommendations of the first piece of work that came out by Adelaide which basically said EPA should lead the development of a tool which would help enact that gap in our act that I talked about earlier and would help us focus on not only the effects but also some of the causes and it would help us so we then start on that journey which helps us develop what I can understand to be with the first regulator to develop a tool that allows us to assess psychological health impacts from pollution and waste and we're using, if we go on to the next slide listen we're using, well let's go on to the next slide we're using go back there, we're using what's called the K10 the Kessler K10 it's a standard instrument the Australian Borough Statistics has used this to ascertain norms across the nation and we actually talked to multiple end-users and looked at different tools and we ended up using this method because we ascertained from the work that we did when there's a pollution impact whether it's from PFAS or whether it's from lead emissions or whether it's from air pollution or industrial event or ODA for example the community experience distress and that was the biggest and clearest marker and so we're using the K10 but we're topping entirely that with specific questions to get a bit more insight in particular at events let's go to the next slide and so this year, this financial year we've working on a study too we're developing and trialling the tool to get more exquisite and detailed information about the efficacy of the tool, the community response and the value and benefit and we're building a dashboard that will allow us to give sort of automated feedback about what the community have said about the harms we'll probably end up using contour maps or heat maps to actually distribute those aims in order to protect people's identity so the whole thing's de-identified it'll have built-in referral services and it'll allow us to get information about which people have been impacted and where so if you're looking at pollution incident and we're trying to execute our remit as an EPA we can also say to the industry hey, not only did you break your license, you've admitted all of these particles to the air, we've measured that this is the impact, but we can say so that's the environmental impact then we can say the other part of our exit we have to protect human health we've undertaken this assessment using the TETI and we can demonstrate of course significant distress in the community and you can see that distress is basically aggregated higher flow to the facility further away, look that's the hypothesis we kind of know that's what happens when we've dealt with other incidents and we know that the communities face distress where they've been flooded and they've lost their homes and we've seen that in New South Wales we've seen it recently with impacts we've been Queensland and we've seen it also in Victoria, so we think it's going to work, we think we're going to get really pretty granular information about the impacts and how people are feeling and obviously as was stated in other responses from the broader research community and the end users community the proof in the pudding will be how that might stand up in VCAP but we're attempting to close that gap in our act by building this tool the first regulator to have a tool that allows us to assess psychological impacts and we know there are distress in the communities whether it's from a proposed development an actual development whether it's from an industrial or natural event at this point in time there's no systematic agreed tool to measure those effects and we're trying to close that gap that we're closing and if I'm really honest I feel really proud of the EPA for stepping up and trying to close that gap it's quite courageous it's a different space for us but we know from the work that we do and the conversations that we have taken into account community concerns is really really significant but actually putting those into metrics and having some formal data is actually much more difficult and this will help us close that gap next slide it changes because it wasn't centered so when it goes from Mac to Windows it kind of messes up the format so it was all left justified everybody before so science that matters measuring what matters to the public I think it's really critical we address community concerns pollution remains an ongoing concern for the community whether it's from water pollution actually the beach reports or air watch or garden the evidence is demonstrable but no people are concerned and when there's a perception you have a problem that you need to deal with it and I always say as a regulator or even as a researcher or anybody like that you need to ask what you can do for the public not what can the public do for you and so typically we've often asked I put my researcher hat on here we've said what can the public do for us what information can we get from them in order to probably get our research what can we do for you how can we assist and support you and programs like beach watch garden site air watch about this is what we can do for you this is how we're helping you I think ultimately ultimately the community see a strong authentic and honest voice and they see you know not spin they see data science evidence transparency published that information and the EPA we seek to do that in all possible cases and we know that we can and you all would know that you can be subject to FOI and you have to cough up the information anyway so it's better that you publish the information but from early in reports and make it available and just be honest about the findings and then provide information about what you're going to do about the problem and why and then ultimately what I always say little things matter picking up a piece of litter or not choosing to discharge your vehicle wash down into the stormwater drain which we're getting to the creek which we're getting to the bay but to do it on the grass and light to soak in these are only little things but we can all do little things and I think the more we're able to convince the community that they can have a very positive and cumulative effect it will really change the dial and that's why community is central for EPA to focus on prevention and community impacts can be achieved significant impacts by engaging the total population and that's what we seek to do at the EPA and that's what I've sought to do in all the work that I've done Richard, I've been a rabbit at John for a long time, I've kind of run out of gas and there's a gazillion questions to answer thank you so much everybody for listening there's still a lot of people here so if you're happy to answer some questions Mark, that would be fantastic it does make me reflect a little bit that you're looking at a new view on regulation maybe reminding people that regulations are there for the community and you know making it more real with that link through to psychology is a good one well I think you can change it regulation has many forms many forms and we've had this debate internally is regulation the same thing as being an authority and the answer the internal preferred is yes about us running these programs outreaching, out-facing programs is about regulation but it's not regulation as giving tickets as we would typically see but it's about supporting the community to make better decisions and it's indirect regulation so if you provide people about information about air pollution and soil pollution but also at the same time provide guidance and advice about how to minimise their risk you're doing your job EPAs can't solve all the problems in the world but we can help people take positive action to mitigate risk and minimise it I think it's a relatively effective way for those of you who don't get your question read out today this is a way to avoid that outcome I will read them out and then Mark you have to go up and answer them so question number one information on the key factors which generally influence EPA's regulatory decisions and actions for contaminated sites health risk assessment and guidelines we have guidelines about allowable concentrations and the reuse of soil and what's at sites and state of knowledge so it could be the NEPM, the NEMP and what sites are going to be used and why so that's how we determine our decisions evidence based using the most recent best available information and guidance and where there's a gap if it's a pollutant or a contaminant it's not in the NEPM or the NEMP we will then look at the best available information EU or the US EPA for example for guidance about what we do and how we might deal with it very good question number two asbestos in mulch New South Wales recent concern has happened in Victoria or Lanford cover recently is that a question has it happened because I don't know if it has happened but look this whole issue and I talked about this it was covered in the Guardian I mentioned it it's absolutely impossible for the EPA to sample a kilogram of mulch or recovered soil of recovered finds it's just unreasonable and so what EPAs across the nation do they set guidelines and requirements and you know there's periodic sampling and all this you know agreed sampling programs that people are meant to adhere to to ensure that the fill is fit for purpose you can you know it's probably it would and the aim of that is to ensure that the product producer fit for purpose evidently it's clear that there are things that slip through the net inadvertently probably largely there's maybe some inadvertent stuff but on the whole I think you know suppliers and regulators seek to do the right thing but it's in it's a Herculean task reprocessing it we're in a period now we're looking at the circular economy reusing it and reusing things in a safe and acceptable way and I think in New South Wales they produce like nearly a 800,000 tonnes a year that's a Herculean task to stay across that ensure that every single gram ounce kilogram etc meets every single guideline but the expectation is that industry turn themselves inside out to meet that standard and we have the same sort of process number three the debate about nuclear power and climate change seems to continue what are your thoughts on long-term waste storage and risks that's a little bit outside of my jurisdiction however other countries do it and they've done it safely and effectively the debate says something it depends which side of the fence you sit on but nobody's going to want nuclear waste stored in their backyard like let's be honest and that's the that will be the biggest hurdle but some have argued very clearly that nuclear power could provide an important transition to a completely carbon free energy source but my understanding is to build nuclear power plants is like 20 years leading time we may have already missed that vote I'm not crossing it I can't talk about it in detail and still the people to ask on that they have to marine agnostic on the use of advocacy of nuclear power but certainly other countries are using it and have used it safely notwithstanding that in Japan the tsunami made that pretty unsafe for a lot of people that was an unusual event but certainly in Europe they're using it in France and in the UK we're in a difficult situation there's a study done on where the best place in the world would be for storing nuclear waste and Australia and the middle of time where it's your best so yeah from that safety point of view try to stack up pretty well number four just wondering if case studies could also be published I think a lot of them are I think it's funny it's a good question because I've got a couple I'm trying to get out a lot of journals don't like case studies but most things that we do are based on case studies and an EPA my team is charged with publishing all of its data as soon as we possibly can it just takes time obviously to clean it prepare it, write it but there's no intention about not publishing the work that we do and indeed we've got KPIs around that so if there's anything in particular maybe just ask me we're not in the business of hiding the data it's about being transparent the attendees want something just send us an email and we can facilitate the public including heavy metals question number five is all the water quality data collected including heavy metals available to the public I think it is all available on data Vic I don't know about the heavy metals I'll be honest but I'm pretty sure we've made we've published the data Vic contains all of the beach report data all of the measures that we've collected some of the also includes heavy metals I'd have to take that one on notice question number six all car emission limits and it's based on the car market in Australia the introduction of ETR systems do you know why an ETR system is because I don't emissions something reduction would be I'm not sure I'm sorry I don't know how to answer that question we'll move on to that question number seven EBA strategy regarding the risk the groundwater due to geothermal energy projects I don't know what the strategy is I don't know if there's any how many geothermal energy projects are active I think there's one someone's trying one down in Gippsland but I'm sorry I cannot answer that question I don't know the answer that's a good question I'm not quite sure what they're asking there they're talking about from sewage or septic systems or I don't know I think it's a fairly quick question regarding maybe in general indicators that can be used well I think at a landfill the leachate has to be tested and treated yes I think the premise of the question is quite good are there general indicators that can be used but we need to know what the thought of earth lawn is that way that's correct so if it's all pay fast stuff let's say and there's leachate produced measure pay fast or if it's landfill and waste just general landfill and waste and it's in the liner and there's a leachate produced you'd probably do a general screening nap and sweep plus a few other things I'm not quite sure what's been sort here I've often thought that we overanalyzed our parameters whereas we're not the better off to have general trends maybe missionals frequently and next question does leachate apply remote sensing in landfill management that's a great question and actually it's something that we looked at recently when we were deciding to use we did a piece of work around assessing the use of remote sensing technology to gather more data simply more quickly and I raised the idea of using remote sensing to ascertain thermal gradients in waste facilities anyway we've decided not to do that as a first trial what I will say is we're really interested in using remote sense data to augment decisions and to expedite intelligence gathering and we do use it to some extent already as I mentioned maybe I mentioned before Richard that we are using remote sensing to look at the spatial distribution of arsenic concentrations in the gold fields to give us more granular information ground truth that with some sampling and data that we've already got but to give us better information about the distribution of contaminants in that area because we know something but we don't know all things so it's a great question we kind of looked at it separate to that we've actually had the operations team have had a significant push in visiting landfill and going out and assessing what they are doing what they're meant to be doing you know obviously can't catch out all people all time but they've had to I forget the number of places they've been to but they had to push in the last 12 months to go out to landfills and make sure that they are meeting their obligations it's a good question I raised it maybe it's something we might come back to for example looking at you know using I thought about using thermal gradients because these things sat on fire could be used thermal gradient analysis remote sensing remote sensor passes over every 24 hours or maybe 48 to see what changes occur and that will help us expedite intervention anyway we didn't choose that we had an open process in EPA about what we should do and why and we ended up doing something else at this particular point in time I think it's touching on a really important point which is we have lots of amazing points it's great measurement points that we use for compliance but often the interpretation we can do from them is pretty limited in really determining overall risk whereas if you've got that sort of more spatial view of the world like remote sensing and that's modeling that joins the gaps we start to move towards more meaningful reporting well it if you're doing auto remote sensing and sucking in that data and assessing it across all the whatever it happens to be and we know they're subject to temporal changes whereas you know arsenic is kind of static whereas you know changing a landfill or temple if you're rather than sending somebody out all the time to a site to ascertain which is consumptive if you're able to use remote sensing that would significantly reduce the burden on your authorized officers and actually allow them to be more targeted in the use of resources and also for the benefit of the industry and also the benefit of the community and the EPA you might then be able to intervene early and stop the whole thing becoming a massive problem this thing becomes a problem for everybody and nobody wants that so we've started to work in this space about using new technologies remote sense data, machine learning artificial intelligence to help us make better focused targeted choices it's a huge field but we've started to work Baro's doing some interesting work in that space as well I'm going to keep moving number 10 is plastic recycling creating more pollution to eliminate micro plastic and using plastic and waste their energy I don't know the answer to that I mean it pushing plastic for burning it's not really ideal because you're basically you're creating emissions but at the moment we all know there are challenges in recycling plastic the first thing is to stop using the stuff which is really hard drink bottles made of plastic toothbrushes made of plastic toothpaste in the tube is made of it's just a nightmare some plastic is really good art bulbs and joints and stuff like that really useful some stuff in vehicles really useful but some of it's unnecessary supermarkets fruit wrapped in plastic which is 50 cents cheaper than picking your own it's just doesn't make sense to me we're not real smart so it's a good question I think the answer is the use of plastic is obviously inducing the production of micro plastics and I didn't show the slide but we've published some studies on micro plastics in homes and it's significant it's inescapable it's the clothes that you wear the products that you use you are generating micro plastics in your house that are deposited on a daily basis unfortunately I cannot remember the stat from the slide that I said Richard move on from but it's in the slide and the paper is available online but needless to say we are all exposed to micro plastics and the question is how do we reduce that well not buying this stuff or using it in the supermarket sometimes there's no choice unfortunately making conscious choices so I don't know if the recycling is creating more micro plastics or not but if we didn't use plastic we wouldn't be in this problem of the risk of creating them the second thing is in phylates I don't know that answer but I know there are several studies that have looked at phylates and bisphenols and the work has been undertaken and regulation in different places to remove BPA or bisphenol from drinking from bottles if you go and buy a drink bottle at your bike store or something they'll say BPA free I don't know what the chemical is that's replaced it but it's probably as bad as that and not cross it the answer is stop using it if we can or minimize the use use natural products in your home because we showed it's pretty clear that carpets in home slough often they produce a ton of micro plastics you wash your machine when you wash your clothes it produces a ton of micro plastics which gets into the sewerage system which goes down to the sewerage treatment plant or into your yard depending on what system you've got and the sewerage treatment system is going to filter out those micro plastics it's a big challenge for us and eventually you get out to sea as you know I'm sorry I can't give a specific answer but burning and it's not really a solution it's kind of a treatment it's a tactical, it's not a strategy the strategy should be how can we stop using this stuff I've got a question should we just pick a couple at the end here Yeah we've only got a couple to go but one question there's a dramatic drop in fertility measured as burn count and that sort of thing I think it's 50% over 50 years and there's been link from between that and various pollution studies etc does the EPA have a view on that? No that's really a health question that sounds like I'm fobbing you off but what got me into thinking about these emerging contaminants years ago is a film and I saw it on a flight somewhere as I was polluting the environment on a flight for any it's a long time ago it's called The Disappearing Mail and it was filmed and made by Canadian Broadcasting Association and I've not been lucky enough to really find it but if you can find that movie it is scary and it talks about what you're talking about Richard the systematic decline in sperm canons since the 50s which parallels without and there's no causation attributed here but the increased use the urbanization of society the increased use of industrial chemicals in products etc whether it's the cause or not I don't know but without shadow of a doubt sperm counts are declining and we also know that as that's declining we also know that wildlife biota are also declining but it's the birds in the garden or the insects so there's something happening what the source and cause of it is the problem I don't know I listen to this amazing podcast and I forget now which program it might have been a BBC one which talked about eels that went to the Sahagasso Sea which is sort of towards the middle of the Atlantic towards Mexico where the eels go out to see they change their sex and then they mate and nobody's actually seen the mate but what they're finding is there are less eels coming back from the Sahagasso Sea so they go out big eels and little eels come back after they've bred and produced and nobody talked about that connectivity between I can probably find the podcast I know I sent it to some of these in Sweden it was an amazing story and nobody's thought about because these things we're looking at going out into the oceans all the seas from the Irish Sea the European continent or if anybody's thought about the discharge of pharmaceutical products and what impact that may be having on the capacity of the eels to morph their sex and of course they live in rivers and we discharge our effluent into rivers in a diluted fort and nobody asked that question and I'd probably do that because I think that's fascinating is that a cause to the reduction in number of eels coming back from the Sahagasso Sea it's just absolutely fascinating I don't have the answer more questions and solutions but hey it's good for us to think about these things and we're interconnected we cannot separate ourselves from nature we are nature we are nature I would have thought given there is this massive reduction in sperm that it would be right up high in the EPA's priority list that we were looking at but it sounds like it's in the public health area but your remit extends across to that doesn't it? Well it kind of does in a broad way but we look at I'm not saying but we're not doing work in that space at the moment we're doing work looking at the discharge of emerging contaminants into wastewater and how easily they get taken up into food of the emerging contaminants pharmaceutical care products etc understanding what those risks actually are that's an evolving piece of work and what thresholds there's no guidance there's no guidelines set around that we have started on that work so let me not say that we're not interested but we've started looking at what's the environment we're looking at considering the environmental consequences of the different efficacy of different wastewater treatment plants as I said before we're looking at how easy is that by those pollutants propagate it through through the food chain we're looking at the presence of those we're looking at what guidance not guidelines but guidance we can give in that space so we're not ignoring it but we're at the start of that journey which is probably down side better than what everybody was to do with the PFAS stuff in the year 2010 and that's we're trying to get ahead of the curve we're not perfect we've got a limited number of resources but we've made a commitment to that space and we've already done some work with others like Syro, UQ Melbourne, Monash we work with other high quality science people to say hey we're a regulator we need this information in order to make a decision about what's okay and what's not okay can you help us so they do the fundamental research and then we transform it into something usable Mark it's gone to a clock I think we might draw a line under that we've got another early night questions plus a couple more here but I think look just really want to appreciate your time today and appreciate the work that you all do I think you do an amazing service and thanks for sharing some of the examples of what you do there and really appreciate your time today thank you for the now 59 people who are still on and for the 126 who signed up for listening to me I hope it was useful I hope it was interesting I'm super passionate still about science I think it's really important social license is critical and Richard thank you very much for inviting me onto the webinar sorry it was difficult to get hold of when I was on holiday but I'd be delighted to come and talk about one of those other things in a bit more detail thank you so much I look forward to talking to you again thank you very much Mark there were 200 great distance overall you'll be very proud of it alright thanks very much cheers