Sick of the stench

By Bridget Cook
MANY Casey residents are kicking up a stink about odours being emitted from a number of sites around the municipality.
A petition with 27 signatures was tabled at last week’s council meeting about the smell coming from Tooradin’s Back to Earth worm farm.
Another petition was also tabled about the odours coming from the Cemetery Road waste transfer station in Cranbourne – something local residents have been campaigning against for the past few months.
Since the complaints, the council has asked the waste transfer station to stop accepting green waste at the site from 1 July, which is believed to be the cause of the stench.
The council has said the expected closure of the tip was 12 January 2012.
A full report into the waste transfer station will be tabled at next week’s council meeting.
Councillor Geoff Ablett said while may it might inconvenience some people that green waste would not be accepted, it was the right thing to do by those residents affected by the odour.
“I do apologise to those who will now have to take their green waste to the Hallam site, it is an inconvenience,” Cr Ablett said. “But those people should try and live in the vicinity of the smell and they would understand. The local residents have had to put up with the smell for five or six years now. I’ll be putting to the council that it be closed for a few weeks for an extensive investigation into the smell.”
In Tooradin, residents are complaining about the stench coming from the worm farm in Tooradin, which also started accepting green waste late last year.
Tooradin resident John Vanderheyden said if the residents didn’t do something about it then it could just get worse and worse.
“I’ve got nothing against people trying to make a living, but not at other people’s expense,” he said. “When the odour’s bad, we can’t open our windows or doors or use our evaporative cooling.
“You know the smell’s bad when you have to cancel Christmas and New Year’s Eve parties because you don’t know what the smell’s going to be like. Sometimes we even have to re-wash our clothes again after they have been on the clothesline, because the smell goes through them.”
The EPA visited the farm last week to investigate the smell.
The worm farm’s operator, Organic Waste Management, did not respond to the News by the time of going to print.