Speech by Councillor Seal Chong Wah

Council Chambers:

CLAUSE B: PROCUREMENT SUB-GROUP

SUBMISSION – SIGNIFICANT CONTRACTING PLAN FOR

SUPPLY AND DELIVERY OF SAND

19th August 2025

I’m speaking to clause B - on this massive council contract for sourcing and supply of sand.

The only ‘environmental risk’ listed in this procurement document is that successful tenders have an appropriate environmental licence.  This is insufficient.

Where is this Council’s tender sustainability criteria? Where is the acknowledgment that sand dredging and mining—driven by global demand for construction—has severe impacts on both land and water ecosystems? 

‘Sustainability’ does not even have its own weighting in the ‘evaluation criteria’ for this contracting plan. 

One reference to ‘environmental systems’ is buried in one selection criteria grouping, with insufficient weighting to have any real impact on selection of suppliers. 

Extraction destroys habitats, causes biodiversity loss, and accelerates coastal and Riverside erosion. 

Erosion undermines flood protection.

All of this makes the impacts of climate change even worse.

We know that Climate Change is already decimating our coastline. 

Published studies on Climate change predict Australia will lose more beaches than any other country in the world. About 40% of our sandy beaches - over 12,000 kilometres of sandy coastline - this century.

We can’t keep taking sand from already fragile beaches and rivermouths to build more roads in our cities.

We all know that the LNP claim that Brisbane is a world leader in Sustainability is fake news - peddled for political gain.

The LNP administration is still managing this city as though there is no urgent climate change crisis, no ecosystem collapse.

We must stop stripping our Earth of its natural resources. Our ecosystems are fragile and collapsing. Our imbalanced Earth is demanding change!

It is vital that we move into a ‘reduce, re-use and recycle’ paradigm.

Firstly, we must start with USING LESS asphalt and concrete.

Laying more and more concrete over our city is not an indicator of a successful city.

In an age of climate change, more concrete means more heat, more flooding, less resilience, and a less liveable city.

We CAN STOP widening our roads.

We CAN HAVE more streetscapes with trees and plants. More grass and garden verges. More parks and less concrete. 

Secondly, there are now many more options than this council's minimal use of recycled material. With a lack of transparent data, it looks like a maximum of 20%. 

There are many ways to use higher quantities of recycled material, including ‘sub-base asphalt’ for roads, and previously used and recycled concrete and asphalt.

Large established Australian companies are already providing much higher recycled content for road surfacing material including recycled plastics, waste toner, old tyres and recycled glass. 

• Manningham and Brimbank councils in Victoria, have built new bike and pedestrian pathways using 100 percent recycled glass and rock. 
• 5 years ago Adelaide opened the first Australian road made entirely from 100% recycled materials.
• A major Northshore Hamilton road upgrade in Brisbane, used 96 % recycled concrete for the road base - but that was a State Government project, not Council.

Yes, we still need some sand for essential supplies - for things like emergency sandbags, but we can recycle more, and ensure there are comprehensive sustainability conditions attached to sourcing.

And before someone from this LNP administration stands up and claims all sorts of fanciful sustainability leadership.

The clear facts are in Council’s Carbon Emissions ‘Public Disclosure’ statements. These were released in order to buy carbon offsets and claim its fake ‘carbon neutral’ status - rather than actually cut emissions.

In these Public Disclosure reports, the carbon emissions from ‘Input Materials for Asphalt Production’- actually went up every year from 2019 to 2023. The last 4 years of reporting. 

Carbon emissions from ‘Construction Materials’ also rose every year in the same period.

If this administration was really committed to replacing sand and other ‘mined inputs’ with recycled materials, those emissions would be going down, not up.

These Public Disclosure reports also reveal the council’s TOTAL ‘carbon emissions’ increased over the 7 years - from its first report in 2016 to its last in 2023.  

TOTAL emissions climbed every year - in the last 3 years of reporting.  

It’s not surprising that the LNP stopped releasing this data.

I cannot support a contract that pays lip service to sustainability and will mean our beaches continue to be mined for Brisbane roads.