For transporting nearly 1400 truckloads of construction trash, including asbestos, to a location he operated in Arcadia, a semi-rural district in northern Sydney, Paul Mouawad (also known as Boulos Isaac) has been found guilty and fined $189,000 for the offence.
Mouawad was charged with two counts of transporting garbage and causing land contamination at the Arcadia site over the course of around seven months in 2017, entered a plea of guilty in the Land and Environment Court.
Investigations at the site, according to NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) Executive Director Carmen Dwyer, showed the soil was polluted with asbestos products and other building waste.
Around 20,000 tonnes of polluted soil were dumped at the site, potentially harming the neighbourhood and the environment, according to Mrs. Dwyer.
"The harsh penalties imposed here is what operators can anticipate if they run unauthorised dumps or don't properly and lawfully dispose of waste.
"We will keep going after people who try to take advantage of the system and don't care about the environment, especially when it comes to asbestos waste, which has the serious potential to harm people's health."
In her ruling, Justice Pritchard ruled that Mr. Mouawad acted carelessly and lacked any sense of regret for his offence. She discovered that the fill, which was placed on the property and came from eight separate source sites throughout Sydney, had seriously harmed the ecology.
Additionally, Mr. Mouawad was ordered to cover the $33,647 in investigation costs incurred by the EPA as well as any agreed-upon or charged legal fees.
The landowner has been given a separate clean-up notice about the property, and he or she has until December 2023 to remediate the area. The EPA will keep checking for compliance.
The EPA invites members of the public to contact the Environment Line at 131 555 to report instances of illegal dumping.
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