James Fairweather (James Fairweather Consulting Pty Ltd)

Reflections
by ALGA Life Member, James Fairweather (James Fairweather Consulting Pty Ltd)

It was a very welcome and totally unexpected honour to be presented with Life Membership of ALGA at ecoforum in October 2023.

It certainly prompted reflection on my time working in contaminated land management and especially my association with ALGA.

By way of background, I graduated in Chemical Engineering at University of Melbourne in 1979 and worked with Orica (formerly ICI Australia) from 1980 until retirement in mid-2021. My career had two halves:

1. the first half (front end) spend in process plant design, start-up and operations, as well as technical/OH&S management and engineering project management roles. A strong focus of these roles was to avoid loss of containment and emissions of hazardous chemicals that might create land and groundwater contamination.
2. the second half spent in contaminated land management. I managed a small team of environmental project managers addressing Orica’s historical land and groundwater contamination issues, the most significant being in its Australian operations.

As a “freshie” in the contaminated land industry in the early 2000s, I was keen to find a way of upskilling and understanding the mysterious and murky world of contaminated land regulations, guidelines and practices. Different environmental consultants would spin different stories to an inexperienced project owner about how serious contamination problems were, and the way the various EPA’s would interpret them. And then there was the whole human health and environmental risk assessment process, with its practitioners being seen as superior beings whose work was: a) hard to penetrate, and b) impossible or resistant to challenge. I lobbied ACLCA to see if they could broaden their church to allow non -consultants to attend their technical meetings, to no avail. It did make me wonder about the “closed shop mentality” of the industry at the time. In this period there seemed to very limited leverage of the overseas remediation expertise within the local consulting industry, even those consultancies that were clearly global/multi-national.

Thankfully, I found there were a number of like-minded people in the industry that saw the value of a very broad contaminated land industry association that was open to all facets of the industry, with the broad objective of information sharing to improve practices in contaminated land investigation and remediation. I shared many fruitful discussions with Drs Peter Nadebaum and John Hunt in the lead-up period to the formation of ALGA.

In the early years of ALGA, I found the branch meetings and conferences a wonderful way to network, learn and challenge my own thinking and biases. So much “good oil” was to be found out over pre-and -post meeting drinks in an informal and collegiate atmosphere. And the views from lawyers’ offices were so inspiring too. And sometimes we needed to continue meetings at other establishments when the caterers’ called “time” …..

I was a member of the Victorian (really Melbourne) branch committee in its early years. I presented regularly at branch meetings and conferences on some of Orica’s issues. I encouraged my Orica team to do likewise. I was also keen to see the Australian consulting and remediation companies lift their game in application of international best practice, so would share learnings from Orica’s attendance at the biennial Battelle Conference on the Remediation of Chlorinated and Recalcitrant Compounds. It was pleasing to see the number of Australian attendees at this conference grow almost exponentially, accelerating improved practice.
 

I decided to nominate for the ALGA Board in November 2020 given circumstances (including imminent retirement from Orica) would afford me the time to contribute effectively to the role. It proved to be a very challenging period for ALGA, with the massive upheaval of COVID-19 continuing through 2020 and 2021, significant organisational instability, CEO resignation and replacement in the first half of early 2022, and a major downturn in ALGA’s financial health through the 2021/2022 financial year, primarily as a result of these factors.

As a member and then Chair of the Finance and Audit Committee, supported by the incoming CEO Matt Potter and some very positive staffing changes, we were able to make significant improvements to the budgeting and financial management processes to stabilise and then start improving ALGA’s financial situation. We also reset the way ALGA manages its investment of its reserve funds, which had become inappropriate to the changed circumstances. I am confident that ALGA now has re-established the right processes, as well as having great people in all key roles, to restore and maintain its long -term financial viability and growth. This is my most gratifying contribution to ALGA.

But by far the greatest thing about my experience with ALGA has been the wonderful people I have met and worked alongside over so many years, especially in the period on the ALGA Board. ALGA is well-positioned with its professional and dedicated staff and a wonderful band of enthusiastic volunteers.

It has been a pleasure to play a small part in the ALGA story, and whilst retirement means more golf and travel rather than branch meetings, webinars and conferences, I will maintain my keen interest in ALGA’s health and its activities.