Damaging Lithgow Mines
Coal mines and a power station near Lithgow west of Sydney are polluting Sydney’s drinking water and damaging endangered wetlands and unique pagoda formations.
In 2015, 4nature took the owners of Springvale underground coal mine and the NSW government to court to stop them polluting Sydney’s drinking water. While we ultimately won the case in 2017, NSW Parliament passed special legislation allowing the mine to keep operating and permanently exempting all existing coal mines in Sydney’s drinking water catchments from strict water quality rules.
In a positive move, a water treatment plant was built to remove the toxins from water extracted from Springvale mine. The water is then used to cool the nearby Mt Piper Power Station (powered by coal from the Springvale coal mine) instead of drawing water from the Coxs River and other streams. It was meant to operate as a zero-discharge system, with no polluted water released into the environment. This began operating in 2019.
Today, these coal mines continue to expand their operations without strict water quality rules. The water treatment plant is failing to operate as planned and the zero-discharge system has been silently abandoned. A large proportion of untreated water is being dumped into Sydney’s drinking water through legal loopholes and poor regulatory oversight and Coxs River water is still being used as a power plant coolant, even though it should no longer be needed.
When the special legislation was passed in 2017, Labor promised in parliament that the ‘next Labor government will amend the legislation to restore the proper protections’. We will be working to hold the NSW Minns Labor government to this pledge.
To make matters worse, the toxic brine by-product from the treatment plant is being mixed with fly-ash from Mt Piper Power Station and deposited into an unlined dump where salt, metals and other toxic chemicals leach into the water table and back into Sydney’s drinking water! This has been occurring for the last 6 years and remedies are only now (2025) being put in place to address the underground toxic plume. The impacts of this massive failure will be felt for decades to come.
4nature is working with environmentalists as part of the Gardens of Stone Alliance to assist with a strategic approach to this complex and important problem. The Alliance is calling for a public inquiry to find answers to the alarming situation.