When Sydney won its bid to host the Olympic Games in the year 2000, it hyped the Games as the "greenest" summer Olympics of all time. But a massive toxic waste dump lies underneath the fine landscaping of the Olympic site at Homebush Bay. The dump is covered by a metre of dirt and a mountain of public relations.

Homebush Bay is a former industrial site and armaments depot which, before its transformation, was subjected to years of unregulated waste dumping. In recent years asbestos-contaminated waste and chemicals including dioxins and pesticides have been found there, along with arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, mercury and zinc. It is the worst toxic waste dump in Australia, and the bay into which the waste leaches is so contaminated that fishing in it is banned. The sediments in the bay have concentrations of dioxin that make it one of the world's worst dioxin hot spots. The dioxin is largely the result of waste from a Union Carbide factory, which manufactured the notorious herbicide Agent Orange there during the Vietnam war.

What is impressive, in PR terms, is the way this massive toxic waste site has been transformed into a "green showcase", thanks in large part to the endorsement of Greenpeace and other key Australian environmentalists [throughout this chapter and the next, "Greenpeace" refers to Greenpeace Australia].

Part of the story of Sydney's PR campaign to win the 2000 Olympics has only recently come to light, through investigations into the scandal over Salt Lake City's bribery of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) which is responsible for selecting between competing cities' bids. In a major report in the Sydney Morning Herald, Gerard Ryle and Gary Hughes revealed a plan by key Australian businessmen and government officials to discredit a bid by Beijing, which was then thought to be the front-runner.

Sydney's secret public relations strategy was developed by businessmen representing industries which stood to benefit financially if the Olympics bid succeeded. They included the managing director of Lend Lease (one of Australia's largest construction companies), the managing director of Optus (the country's second largest telecommunications company), and a corporate lawyer and close adviser to media mogul Kerry Packer. In December 1992, these individuals met with New South Wales Premier John Fahey to discuss how publicizing China's human rights record could be used to damage its bid, and also how to deflect expected criticism of Sydney's bid from the news media, Aborigines, environmentalists and trade unionists. The group agreed to hire a public relations strategist to help them.

An unofficial committee, named after businessman Ross Turnbull who had organized the meeting, continued working together and steering the bid from behind the scenes. Three international members were added to the committee, including James Wolfensohn, the Australian-born president of the World Bank. The "Beijing strategy" was put together by the Turnbull committee with the help of Gabrielle Melville, a former BHP public relations strategist, and Sir Tim Bell, former head of Saatchi and Saatchi advertising company in Australia, and adviser to Margaret Thatcher (which earned him a knighthood).

The Beijing strategy involved covertly funding a human rights group to campaign against China's human rights abuses in the lead-up to the Games decision. The campaign was to be based in Europe or the United States to divert suspicion from Australia. A book was to be published on the same topic, and "an eminent international identity" would be paid to have his name on the book. A story would also be "planted" in the London Times newspaper. Sydney Games officials claim that this plan was never implemented, but in the months leading up to the bid decision in 1993 there was a US-based human rights campaign that damaged Beijing's bid.

Selling Sydney

A veil of secrecy was wrapped around the setting of strategies for the Sydney bid by establishing a private company, called Sydney Olympics 2000 Bid Ltd (SOBL), to oversee the bidding process. As a private company, SOBL was exempt from Freedom of Information requests, thus protecting it from having to disclose its internal reports and documents. SOBL's articles of association ensured that information was tightly controlled so that very few people had access to documents, and photocopies were prohibited.

Secrecy was further enhanced through various arrangements with the media. A Communications Commission was formed to take charge of public relations strategies, chaired by the managing director of the Clemengers advertising agency. Other members of the commission included the national director of advertising for Australian Consolidated Press, the media director of the state premier's office, and the general manager of marketing for the Ampol oil company.

A remarkable admission of the media's complicity in the bidding process came in February 1999 from Bruce Baird, a former government minister for New South Wales who was responsible for the bidding process. Baird claimed that he had obtained the agreement of three major media executives not to run stories about the wining, dining and other blandishments offered to IOC officials.

The three executives named by Baird were Kerry Packer (owner of Consolidated Press Holdings), Ken Cowley (chief executive of Murdoch's News Ltd), and John Alexander (then editor-in-chief of the Sydney Morning Herald). All three have vehemently denied Baird's claims, describing them as "absolute bullshit" and "rubbish," and Baird has subsequently recanted.

What is known, however, is that Packer, Cowley and Alexander all accepted invitations to sit on the SOBL committee. All of the Australian commercial television channels, the three main media companies, and a number of radio stations were involved in supporting the bid, either through being on bid committees or through direct sponsorship of the bid. At the time that the bidding was underway, Herald journalist Mark Coultan stated: "Journalists who write stories which might be seen as critical are reminded of their bosses' support and told that their stories would be used against Sydney by other cities."

The Sydney Morning Herald also editorialized in support of the Sydney bid, and SOBL financed the fare of a Herald journalist to Monaco to report on the bid deliberations. Another Herald journalist, Sam North, was assigned to report on the Olympics, and wrote a succession of favourable stories, several of which appeared in advertising supplements funded by Olympic sponsors. News Ltd's Telegraph Mirror also gave unwavering good PR to the bid.

As the bidding and selection process for the 2000 Olympics got underway, the IOC made it clear that it wanted to have a "green" Olympics. IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch said the IOC's primary concern would be to ensure that the environment was respected and that this would be taken into account in the final vote on site selection. For Australia, therefore, it was critical to present its bid as "green" despite the toxic waste buried at Homebush Bay.

The co-option of Greenpeace was a key factor in the success of this campaign. The organization had campaigned against hazardous landfill dumps for many years, so its support for the Homebush Bay Olympic site helped reassure a public that might otherwise have been concerned about the site's toxic history.

To win over Greenpeace, SOBL invited it to draw up environmental guidelines for the construction and operation of the Olympic facilities. The proposed design of the Olympic athletes' village was developed by a consortium of architects, including a firm commissioned by Greenpeace. On paper, the design looked impressive. It provided for the use of solar technology and solar designs, state-of-the-art energy generation, and waste water recycling systems.

For Greenpeace, participation in developing a showcase Olympic village offered another benefit: the opportunity to transform its own image. Instead of simply sounding the alarm on environmental problems as it had done for the previous twenty years, the "new Greenpeace" would be seen as promoting solutions.

Greenpeace involvement in the Sydney bid soon went beyond simply offering ideas: it became a vocal supporter. Karla Bell, cities and coasts campaigner for Greenpeace, made a statement supporting the environmental merits of the full bid when the IOC visited Sydney early in 1993. Her statement did not mention the problem of land contamination. She made an obvious impression on the IOC, whose report in July of that year "noted with much satisfaction the great emphasis being placed on environmental protection in all aspects of the bidding process and the attention being paid to working closely with environmental protection groups such as Greenpeace".

Support also came from Paul Gilding, the head at the time of Greenpeace International who previously had headed Greenpeace Australia. "The Olympic village provides a prototype of future environmentally friendly development not only for Australia, but for cities all around the world," Gilding stated in a March 1993 news release.

SOBL hired Karla Bell and Kate Short (now Kate Hughes) of the Sydney Total Environment Centre (TEC) to draw up environmental guidelines for the Games. Short was a prominent Sydney environmentalist who had a long history of campaigning on toxic issues, particularly pesticides. The guidelines drawn up by Bell and Short advocated the use of recyclable and recycled building materials, the use of plantation timber as opposed to forest timber, and tickets printed on "recycled post consumer waste paper." Short and other environmentalists and consultants were also appointed to a special environmental task force advising SOBL.

Some environmentalists, however, remained sceptical. The TEC distanced itself from Short's involvement, and TEC director Jeff Angel argued that the Sydney Olympic bid was ignoring significant environmental problems. "The state of Sydney's environment has been misrepresented to a serious degree," he said. "For example, the [New South Wales] Premier in his Introduction to the Bid's Fact Sheets describes the Games as occurring in a pollution-free environment. The bid document asserts Sydney's waste system can cope, when in fact we have a waste crisis." Environmentalists were also concerned about the diversion of revenue into extravagant sports facilities and the loss of valued local ecosystems.

Environmentalists were particularly angry when they discovered that the official bid document to the IOC claimed support from various environmental groups, including the Australian Conservation Foundation, the New South Wales Nature Conservation Council and the TEC. Although individuals affiliated with those organizations had joined the bid committee's environmental task force, the groups themselves emphatically denied their support. The statement had to be retracted.

Notwithstanding these misgivings, the issue of toxic contamination of the site was not openly discussed prior to the Olympic decision. This was clearly because of the inaccessibility of relevant information and the successful co-option of key environmentalists who reassured others that the site was being cleaned up properly.

In private communications at the time of the bidding process, Greenpeace's toxics campaigner Robert Cartmel told me that "there is every likelihood that the remediation measures being undertaken at Homebush Bay won't measure up". He said that this was "an area that would be considered to be a Superfund site [for an explanation of this term, see page 229]" in the US. He warned that "when it comes to leakage of toxic materials, it is not a question of if, it is a question of when. There is no such thing as a safe landfill." Yet Cartmel was unwilling to publicly criticize Greenpeace's involvement in the Olympics bidding process.

From Rhetoric To Reality

The promised measures, particularly the village design and the environmental guidelines, were heralded as a major environmental breakthrough in urban design. "No other event at the beginning of the 21st Century will have a greater impact on protecting the environment than the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney," stated a SOBL news release. New South Wales minister Bruce Baird said that Sydney's Olympics would be an environmental showpiece to the rest of the world and a model for other cities to follow in future games. Ros Kelly, the Federal Minister for Environment, Sport and Territories, also put out a news release arguing that "a vote by the international community for Sydney will be a vote for the environment".

Once the bid was won, however, the government's lack of genuine commitment to a green Olympics became apparent. It discarded the winning village design, the one that was supposed to be a showcase of green technology. The consortium of architects that had designed the village, including the Greenpeace-commissioned architects, complained of being "absolutely shafted". Within a year, Greenpeace was forced to denounce the government's failure to keep to the environmental guidelines written by Short and Bell.

Cost considerations also led the planners to quietly shelve another environmental showcase, the Olympic Pavilion and Visitors Centre. The original design had envisaged a centre made of recycled materials with natural ventilation.

In 1994, Paul Gilding resigned as head of Greenpeace International and went into business for himself as an environmental consultant. One of his clients was Lend Lease/Mirvac, the same company that had participated in behind-the-scenes strategizing to win the Sydney bid. Lend Lease was hired to draw up a new plan for the athletes' village. The new village design, unveiled in 1995, was touted as environmental because it used solar technology, even though the plans called for the use of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) as a building material.

Greenpeace has campaigned internationally against the use of PVCs, and the environmental guidelines which it helped draft for the Sydney Olympic Games had called for "minimizing and ideally avoiding the use of chlorine-based products (organochlorines) such as PCB, PVC and chlorinated bleached paper". The Olympic Coordination Authority's decision to abandon this commitment came in the wake of a deliberate public relations campaign by the plastics and chemical industry.

In 1995, Andrew Byrne of the Sydney Morning Herald revealed how Australia's Plastics and Chemical Industries Association (PACIA) was financing a campaign to undermine commitments to a PVC-free Games. PACIA was concerned that making the village a PVC-free showpiece would add momentum to the Greenpeace campaign against organochlorines&emdash;a reasonable fear, since that was precisely the point behind the original environmental recommendations.

Using contributions from member companies, the PACIA launched a PVC Defence Action Fund for the purpose of bringing pro-PVC experts from Europe to brief key government officials. Other tactics detailed in a document obtained by Byrne included enlarging its Olympic lobbying program, developing a "credibility file" on Greenpeace, and promoting the benefits of PVC on the internet. PVC manufacturer James Hardie even became a member of the Olympic Village planning consortium.

The government continued with its own PR activities, offering guided tours of the Olympic site to the public, and announcing a major tree-planting effort coordinated by a "Greener Sydney 2000" committee, which would provide "a unique opportunity to involve the whole community in the 2000 Olympics". A landscaping project for the site was heralded as greening the site, even though the toxic waste beneath remained untreated.

As evidence of toxic contamination of the site filtered out, environmentalists involved in the Olympics bidding began to change their stories. In 1995, 'Four Corners', the ABC's major television current affairs program, featured Greenpeace and Kate Short criticizing the cover-up of the site's toxic contamination (which they had known about all along, but had previously refrained from mentioning).

In subsequent years, Greenpeace staged various actions to highlight dioxin contamination in the vicinity of the Olympic site. "Our investigations show that not only is the 'Green Games' concept rapidly becoming a cynical farce, but that the presence of high levels of dioxin at Homebush Bay presents a real environmental and health threat", stated one Greenpeace news release. David Richmond, the head of the Olympic Coordination Authority (OCA), responded by accusing green groups who highlighted toxic contamination of the Games site as doing "damage to Australia".

A number of revelations about dioxin on the Homebush site posed another public relations crisis for the OCA in 1997. Colin Grant, OCA's executive director of planning, environment and policy, publicly stated that the site did not contain any 2,3,7,8 TCDD (the most toxic form of dioxin). After this statement was proven false, the OCA was forced to "unreservedly" apologize for the "mistake".

Hired by OCA as an "environmental special adviser," Kate Short organized a series of forums in 1998 on "Dioxin and Beyond: Enhancing Remediation Strategies at Homebush." In reality, the forums were carefully staged public relations events aimed at creating the appearance of public consultation without the openness that true public involvement would have required. Attendance was by invitation only, and the forums primarily showcased speakers dwelling on good news about the remediation.

Following the forum series, in what seemed like an attempt to give the forums a veneer of having been a real consultation, the Australian government announced that a further $11.6 million would be spent for an "enhanced remediation program" which would consist of validation, monitoring and "education and community development" involving school children, but no further treatment of the wastes.

As the pressure mounted for public disclosure of documents relevant to the Sydney bid, the Games promoters turned again to using the cover of a private company in order to maintain secrecy, claiming that its financial documents belonged to internal auditors who were a private firm and therefore exempt from Freedom of Information rules.

Although involvement in the Olympic Games has been an environmental embarrassment, it has also been a goldmine of opportunities for the individuals and organizations that supported the Sydney bid. The Sydney Morning Herald became a "Team Millennium Partner" for the Games, and it established a unit to "maximize the associated commercial opportunities".

Karla Bell and Paul Gilding both left Greenpeace to become consultants to companies seeking contracts to construct Olympic facilities. Both have also participated as paid consultants in preparing Stockholm's bid for the 2004 Olympics.

By contrast, Robert Cartmel, the Greenpeace campaigner whose misgivings kept him from joining in the campaign to greenwash Homebush Bay, has since been squeezed out of his job.

Media Self-Censorship

"Openness not the Australian way: Games chief" was the headline of the Sydney Morning Herald after the Sydney Olympic Coordination Authority continued to refuse to release documents relating to the tendering process for Olympic facilities. The Herald reported that the head of the Authority, David Richmond, had "said there was a commercial culture in Australia which made it difficult to release the information, even though similar documents were made public in the privately funded Olympic Games in Atlanta and Salt Lake City".

But it has not only been commercial information that the Games authorities have sought to keep secret. In 1993 two senior officials&emdash;the general manager and the information manager of the Homebush Bay Development Corporation&emdash;visited me and my head of department to demand to see a copy of an article I had written for New Scientist, an international science magazine, on the remediation of the Homebush Bay toxic waste site where authorities were hoping to locate the year 2000 Olympic Games.

The timing of my article, and of the visit by these government officials, was critical. The article had already been accepted for publication and was scheduled to appear in the weeks leading up to the International Olympic Committee's final decision about which city would host the year 2000 games. The front-runners at the time were Sydney, Beijing and Manchester.

My article detailed the contaminants buried at the site, government efforts to bypass public consultation on site remediation, and inadequacies in the government's preferred remediation process which would leave contaminants untreated on site. Some of the information for the article had been obtained from unpublished reports commissioned by a state government authority. I had gained access to these reports as an academic researcher; but after finding out that I was writing an article, the person who had given me access demanded the right to review the article prior to publication. And then came the visit from the senior officials.

My visitors told me that some of the reports that I obtained were not even available to the public under Freedom of Information legislation (implying that they therefore had some sort of right to control information obtained from them). I told them that they should approach New Scientist for a copy of the article. Within three days of this visit I received a phone call from the magazine's deputy editor, informing me that they had held an editorial meeting and decided not to run the article. He said the article was well written and balanced but that they had decided to "kill" it for political reasons.

He gave me three reasons. First, it would be unfair to run such a story on the environmental credentials of the Sydney bid if they did not run stories on the environmental credentials of the Manchester and Beijing bids, and there was no time to do that before the winner was announced. Second, he said that the Chinese were playing dirty and would use such an article to campaign against Sydney winning the Olympics, and that at all costs they didn't want China to win the Games. Third, he feared that the magazine would bear the brunt of blame if it published my article and Sydney lost the bid.

The Australian media were effectively closed to criticism of the Sydney bid at this time. The Australian Centre for Independent Journalism published a special Olympic Edition of its newsletter Reportage which covered a number of stories that were not being covered in the general media. The Centre's director, Wendy Bacon, noted that the few journalists who wrote critical stories had been "attacked as unpatriotic, eccentric, inaccurate and negative". Meanwhile, public support for the bid had been mobilized using a "pervasive media and marketing exercise" which included putting the bid logo on milk cartons, car registration stickers, buses, and many other places.

The state government began releasing information about the contamination of the site to the media shortly after the bid had been won, carefully framing the information in terms of the clean-up. "Restoring Homebush Bay for the 2000 Olympics, billed as the biggest environmental repair job undertaken in Australia, is reversing decades of environmental abuse at a cost of $83 million," reported an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, which went on to reassure the public that the clean-up would make the site perfectly safe.

My article, the one that had been "killed," was published a month later in the Australian Current Affairs Bulletin. I was subsequently interviewed about it on Australian public television. The Homebush Bay Development Corporation responded by issuing a news release headlined "Attack on Remediation Program Scientifically Flawed."

It claimed that "all the allegations contained in the article were bereft of fact. What we are doing at Homebush Bay is the greatest urban environmental reformation seen in Australia's history… The remediation strategies adopted for Homebush Bay are the best international practice for the type of contamination at the site… Scientists with proven track records in this field endorse this approach." The release neglected, however, to identify by name any of these "proven scientists" or their evidence.

The release also denied there had been any cover-up of the contamination. It claimed that there had been a public information campaign consisting of "a series of brochures distributed to the local community, meetings with local environment and community groups, an environmental segment in a video played at all shopping centres peripheral to the Homebush Bay site, release of technical documents to unions and local councils and inclusion of environmental representatives in a workshop to determine the final accepted remediation strategies for Homebush Bay".

The Sydney Morning Herald reported on the Corporation's response, even though it had not deemed my article important enough to mention previously. Its Olympics reporter, Sam North, wrote an article based on the press release, criticizing my article without contacting me for comment. When I contacted the Herald to complain about inaccuracies in North's article, the paper refused to report on my response and suggested I write a letter to the editor, which they published.

After it was announced that Sydney would host the 2000 Games, the Freedom of Information Act for New South Wales was amended to ensure that Sydney Olympic committee documents could not be accessed. This decision was criticized by the NSW Ombudsman, who pointed out that the exemptions to the Act had been added without public consultation.

The amendment specifically denied the public access to contracts, proposals for the various Olympic facilities including the athletes' village, the criteria for selecting contractors, progress reports, committee meetings, and public opinion surveys. Contractors who worked on the facilities had to sign a confidentiality agreement. Even the contract between the NSW government and the International Olympic Committee remained a state secret.

In 1996, Herald environment writer Murray Hogarth reported on the continuing secrecy surrounding the Games: "Though we are less than four years out and closing fast, there are five rings of secrecy enveloping key aspects of Sydney's Olympics. They are the often-impenetrable International Olympic Committee (IOC), the State Government with its spin doctors, the 30-year Cabinet secrecy rules and the ban on Freedom of Information requests, SOCOG and its media Games-keepers, OCA's ICAC-inspired probity requirements, and finally big business, with a tangled web of confidentiality agreements."

In 1997, Nathan Vass of the Herald reported that the state government was considering setting up a multi-million dollar strategy to deal with an expected 5,000-or-so international non-accredited journalists who would be hanging around Sydney before and during the 2000 Games looking for stories. Such journalists, unlike the 15,000-or-so officially accredited journalists there to report on the sporting events, were likely to be the source of critical stories.

In preparation for this feared onslaught of scrutiny, the Olympics manager of the Australian Tourist Commission recommended a "crisis media management program" to deal with negative stories about the environment, the ozone layer and Aboriginal issues. The plan called for seeking money from Olympic sponsors to establish a centre to house and respond to such journalists, thereby ensuring that "the non-accredited media present Sydney in a very positive fashion".

In the years following the winning of the bid, the story of the toxic-waste contamination of Homebush Bay was well covered by the Australian media and also received some international coverage, especially in Germany. But as journalists from throughout the world began arriving in Sydney to cover the Olympics, were they able to see through the "media management" that wasbeing geared up to greet them?

Selling a Leaky Landfill as the "World's Best Practice"

In 1989, Australian government authorities decided to use Homebush Bay as the site for a future Olympic Games. Even the chance of winning an Olympic bid, however, could not justify spending the $190 million that experts estimated it would cost to contain and treat the toxic wastes buried there. The government therefore sought a cheaper, more modest remediation strategy that could be carried out in time for the 1993 Olympic bid.

Authorities considered various options for dealing with the wastes. One possibility was to segregate and treat the wastes, but this would have been difficult and expensive.

Another possibility would have been to take a "bank vault" approach&emdash;sealing up and walling in the wastes. This approach would have entailed tightly containing the contaminated soil with double liners beneath, soil capping over the top, leachate drains, and gas collection and treatment systems. This approach was tried for a badly contaminated embankment where the Olympic swimming facility was to be built, but the planners decided that it was too expensive to be used elsewhere.

A third, cheaper option was chosen for the rest of the site. It eliminated the gas collection and treatment systems and the double liners. This option meant that the wastes would continue to leak into underlying groundwater. A consultant to the government explained the reasoning behind this approach:

The liability associated with deterioration and or failure of a "bank vault" secure landfill remained constant with time, but its probability of occurrence increased with time as the facility aged. By contrast the leaky landfill would over time carry less liability as the quality of leachate eventually improved. Therefore it is an intrinsically more robust or resilient way of limiting risks.

In other words, the waste would be disposed of by letting it slowly leak into the surrounding environment, rather than by alternative means that carried the risk of a financial liability that might be incurred by a possible sudden and more traceable major failure in the future.

In public discussions, however, these cost and liability issues were not raised. Instead, the public was told that the leaky landfill was the only feasible option, given the difficulty of treating the diverse range of chemicals that were present on the site. The option of a more secure "bank vault" landfill was not discussed outside of consultants' reports.

By choosing the leaky landfill option, the planners were able to reduce the cost of remediation of the Olympic site from $190 million to $69 million, including landscaping and road base preparations. This enabled most of the remediation to be completed by 1993, in time for Sydney to win the bid for the 2000 Olympic Games.

Australian guidelines are quite explicit about the public's right to know and participate in decision-making about the clean-up of contaminated sites. The remediation work at Homebush Bay, however, was carried out without proper public consultation. The government's reports on contamination at the site and the risks associated with it have not been published. In their place are newsletters and brochures produced for public relations purposes.

In 1992, when the remediation was already underway, a local environmental group conducted a survey which found that seventy-one per cent of the respondents felt that they were not getting enough information to form an opinion about what was being done in the Homebush Bay area. Roughly the same number&emdash;seventy-five per cent&emdash;-said they had not received enough information to satisfy them that the area would be safe for people to live and work.

The usual process in NSW for involving the public in such decisions is through the public and advertised display of an environmental impact statement (EIS), after which the public is able to make submissions. The mandatory requirement for such an EIS to be prepared was removed through the introduction of a new Regional Environmental Plan prepared by the NSW Department of Planning. It gave the NSW Minister for Planning full authority to give consent for development of the area earmarked for Olympic facilities and allowed development of the contaminated land within the area&emdash;including landfilling, removal and reworking of filled material&emdash;to occur without the normal consultation process. The assistant director of planning at the NSW Department of Planning said the former plan was "too restrictive" because it caused delays in construction and prevented earthmoving on site because of fears of contamination. This would have hindered the construction of Olympic facilities.

The new Regional Environmental Plan angered some environmentalists. According to Jeff Angel, director of the Total Environment Centre, the plan allowed the government to be "a law unto itself. It is incredible that despite the concerns previously expressed by environmentalists that Sydney's Green Olympic bid was all hot air, the government still felt it necessary to issue the REP in this form."

On the day the bid was announced, the Regional Environment Plan came into effect, giving the minister powers to approve any development at Homebush Bay whether or not it was environmentally damaging. The head of Greenpeace at the time, Lynette Thorstensen, told the Herald that this was not a setback: "At this stage we are much more interested in seeing the green development up and running than having ourselves locked up in disputes about process."

The urgency to get the Games ready without bothering about due process is something that the Olympic authorities undoubtedly appreciated. Public relations is a much simpler and more controllable process than genuine public consultation.

In the absence of true public participation, PR around the Homebush Bay site focused on vacuous media stunts and photo opportunities. A brochure by the Olympic Coordination Authority falsely described the remediation of the site as "world's best practice."

On 31 October 1998 the OCA also organized an "Olympic Neighbors Day." Titled "The Big Clean-up," the event took area residents on a tour of the nicely landscaped Olympic site, while avoiding mention of the toxic wastes buried underneath the new lawns and shrubbery that will be slowly contaminating these neighbours' groundwater for years to come.

Greenpeace's Continuing Role

Greenpeace continues to promote the Games as "green". On its current "Greenpeace's Green Olympics Campaign" website, Greenpeace states that "the Olympic site itself has been made safe", and a June 1999 Greenpeace brochure states that "Sydney authorities were thorough in their efforts to remediate before construction began. Most of the waste remains on site, in state of the art land fills, covered with clay, vegetated to blend in with the Olympic site."

This raises several problems for Greenpeace's credibility. For years it has campaigned against disposing of toxic waste by landfill, particularly when it includes dioxin, organochlorines and heavy metals, because it is impossible to prevent toxic material from leaking into underlying groundwater. The major landfills on the Olympic site contain these sorts of wastes without even the protection of linings to mitigate the flow of leachate through the underlying soil. However, when questioned, Greenpeace's current Olympic campaigners didn't seem to know this&emdash;which raises the question of the basis for the organization labelling the landfills as "state of the art".

An earlier Greenpeace International brochure entitled "Waste Generation: The Real Source of the Problem" states: "There is no safe way to dispose of toxic waste. The solution is not to produce it in the first place." It explains: "Searching for new ways of disposing of waste is the worst possible way of dealing with the problem. Toxic chemicals leak from landfills." In criticizing Browning-Ferris Industries in one of its Greenwash Snapshots (Greenwash Snapshot #15: A case study in waste disposal, 1992), Greenpeace International pointed to the company's dependence on landfills, saying that "landfills will pose a severe threat to underground water supplies for many decades to come".

In its own literature, Greenpeace still states that "landfills eventually leak pollution into the surrounding environment", and makes it clear that this is not a suitable disposal method for toxic waste found near the Olympic site. Yet, as part of its green marketing role, Greenpeace has turned round and stated categorically that an unlined landfill on the Olympic site is "safe".

Darryl Luscombe, toxics campaigner for Greenpeace, wrote in a 1997 letter to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald that Greenpeace had long advocated the closure of Castlereagh, a landfill facility which leaked despite being chosen for its impermeable clay soil (unlike the more permeable soils at the Olympic site). When asked what he thought of the landfills on the site, he said that it was his opinion that the biggest issue was what was going to happen to the waste afterwards. The landfills should only be a temporary solution, he argued, since "tens of thousands of litres" of material was leaching out of them. He admitted there was "no guarantee" that the government would do anything more, since the Olympic Coordinating Authority would cease to exist and the government had made no commitments to do any further remediation after the Games.

When asked if it was realistic to expect that any further clean-up would occur on site after the Games, Luscombe claimed that "the site is safer than it was", and pointed out that whereas before there was a toxic waste dump, "now there is a toxic waste dump that is more highly managed".

The precautionary principle suggests that landfill should not be used to dispose of toxic material, yet Greenpeace is now undermining this principle. Whether it admits it or not, its public acceptance of the "remediation" process on the Olympic site, and its active promotion of the Olympics as green, has been interpreted as an endorsement of landfill as a safe means of disposal of toxic waste. Greenpeace has helped turn the site and its surrounds into highly desirable real estate. It is now suggesting that this can be done elsewhere.

It is an example that other potential host cities for the Olympic Games have been taking up. For example, Toronto is bidding for the 2008 Games, and in an effort to similarly put together a "green" bid it has formed an environmental committee. Luscombe travelled to Toronto to attend this committee's first meeting. Toronto has even copied the idea of siting the Olympic athletes' village on a contaminated former industrial site. The land was originally going to be the site of low-income housing but the remediation would have cost too much. Now the Sydney Olympic example has shown Toronto how the clean-up can be done on the cheap. The added bonus for the Toronto bidders is that, if they promise to turn the village over to low-income housing afterwards, they might get social justice groups on side. These groups opposed Toronto's bid in 1996.

And don't think the Olympic precedent is being lost on developers in other parts of Australia. The "remediation" at the Olympic site is already being used as a model for other contaminated sites. The greenwashing in this case suits not only the Olympic organizers, but also manufacturers that generate toxic wastes, those that bury them, and developers that seek to profit from the land on which these toxic wastes have been buried. A whole polluting industry that Greenpeace has been trying to phase out has now been given a PR boost by Greenpeace itself.

The landfills are not the only waste problem associated with the Olympic site. In 1997 Luscombe made a submission to the government on its plans to expand the Lidcombe Liquid Waste Plant (LWP). The plant is located between the Olympic sporting facilities and the athletes' village. Luscombe argued that the plant "should be phased out as a matter of priority". Amongst the concerns he raised in his submission were the "health and safety issues associated with the close proximity (240 metres) of the LWP to existing or proposed residential areas (eg. Newington/Olympic village)" and its "potential to contribute significant adverse effects on the area during major public events such as the Olympics". He also noted the "complaints from nearby residents regarding noxious odours and VOC [volatile organochlorine] emissions from the LWP". He claimed that "a facility that emits toxic, carcinogenic, persistent and bioaccumulative compounds to the environment, particularly within 250 metres of residential housing, clearly contradicts all of the principles of sound urban planning and environmental responsibility."

Yet the proximity of the athletes' village to the Liquid Waste Plant was known to Greenpeace when it offered its design for the village; and the current Greenpeace literature on the "Green Games", whilst praising the solar design of the village and the other environmental virtues of the Olympic Games, makes no mention of the plant and the dangers it poses.

When Blair Palese, the international coordinator of Greenpeace's Olympics campaign, was queried about Greenpeace's willingness to label the Olympics as "green" despite the landfills on site, the waste plant emitting toxic emissions in its midst, and the use of ozone depletors in Olympic venues, she pointed to Greenpeace's Olympics report card which gave marks for various aspects of the Games. She said that because Greenpeace failed the Olympic Coordinating Authority for refrigeration and cooling, as well as for its clean-up of the land and bay surrounding the Olympic site, Greenpeace was not greenwashing the Games. (The scorecard did not mention the Liquid Waste Plant, and gave the clean-up of toxic waste on site a "B" for "bare minimum effort".) Blair saw nothing wrong with continuing to label the Games as "green" and maintaining their Greenpeace endorsement: "Greenpeace doesn't believe anything is perfect", she said. "We don't believe demanding absolute success in advance makes sense."

Greenpeace's Olympics campaigner Michael Bland told New Scientist: "You can't promote these as the green Games on the world stage while at the same time allowing the use of HCFCs in the cooling system of one of the main venues, especially when there are alternatives such as ammonia". Yet this is just what Greenpeace is doing, despite its scorecard. Contrary to his comments to New Scientist, Michael Bland&emdash;like Blair Palese&emdash;has no problems with Greenpeace publicizing the Games as "green", despite its environmental problems. "We're just using a bit of rhetoric to get our point across", he says.

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