The Kaniva property was the final destination for an illegal dumping syndicate whose operations grew so large they distorted the national market in toxic waste disposal.

But five years on, we know the truth. Covered by a thin layer of topsoil were the pits that White had dug and that he was filling with toxic waste — millions of litres of chemicals and tonnes of asbestos-contaminated products brought by the truckload.

White claimed it was a quad-biking course for his children, an answer that satisfied the curiosity of the council officer.

He began by building a road, designed to support the weight of heavy vehicles, into the desolate patch. Later, White bulldozed a network of tracks deep into the interior of the property that dead-ended in oddly shaped clearings of rough, red earth.

In August 2012, former truck driver and sandblaster Graham Leslie White bought a 567-hectare block of useless scrubland outside the tiny western Victorian town of Kaniva, nearly five hours from his home and businesses in Melbourne.

Industry sources who declined to be identified for fear of retribution by their employers say the waste industry operates on thin margins.

Some time after 2013, White made an informal arrangement with waste recycling and remediation company, Bradbury. Their pitch to the producers and owners of toxic waste was simple — we can do it cheaper.

The failure to arrest this operation also laid the groundwork that sparked two of Melbourne’s worst-ever industrial fires.

By the time the scheme was accidentally exposed in 2018, White and his associates at Bradbury Industrial Services had illicitly buried or stockpiled an estimated 50 million litres of highly flammable solvents and other toxic materials.

Victoria's Environment Protection Authority — relying on a paper-based tracking system and a lax inspection regime — was blindsided by this dark market that threatened public safety and the welfare of emergency services personnel.

The syndicate for years circumvented the monitoring system, according to former officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. They said the system until 2018 was “wide open” to manipulation by rogue operators.

Toxic waste is supposed to be processed in a plant and turned into low-grade industrial fuel, or remediated to the greatest extent possible then disposed of at a licensed facility. It is also meant to be traceable from the cradle to the grave by the EPA.

It was physically impossible for Bradbury to handle that much material.

“Some businesses wouldn’t have been aware of who they were dealing with,” the industry source said. “Others would have been suspicious but happy to take the cheaper price. More than a few wouldn’t have thought twice about where their material was going to end up.”

An investigation by The Age has revealed that manufacturers, chemical companies, waste processors, and paint, automotive and cleaning businesses across the eastern states quickly signed up.

The syndicate offered to dispose of products at up to half the cost of competitors. Sometimes they offered to transport chemicals from the factory door for free.

A number of companies were startled to learn from The Age that their products have turned up at White’s dump sites.

One of the stockpiles of toxic waste in warehouse in Epping. Credit:Justin McManus

"There were obvious failures along the supply chain, with emphasis on waste generators who have a responsibility to the environment and the community, to ensure waste generated as part of their processes are disposed of appropriately. There should have been systems and processes in place to audit this system."

Peter Anderson, chief executive of the Victorian Waste Management Association, said the rise of the illegal marketplace could be attributed to "poor governance and enforcement inaction" by regulators like the EPA.

As long as the transaction was completed, there was little verification about what happened to the material once it stopped moving in the system, he said.

“The EPA is focused on ensuring hazardous materials get safely from A to B and that authorised operators are storing at the levels they are permitted to store rather than what’s happening in the market,” industry consultant Geoff Latimer, of Ascend Waste and Environment, said.

Part of the vulnerability was that, until very recently, industry players had the option of using “paper-based” certificates to record a transaction. They were not typically subjected to in-depth audits by the EPA unless a specific problem was identified.

Bradbury was the public front of the syndicate. Former clients and competitors said that by 2016, the company had cornered much of the solvent-recycling market.

“In hindsight,” the business owner says, “yes, it was too cheap''.

Others acknowledge they should have known something was wrong. When dealing with Bradbury, one NSW business owner said the price of transporting the waste to Melbourne and recycling it was cheaper than doing it in Sydney.

The British Oxygen Company (BOC), which has been sending contaminated acetylene tanks to White for remediation and disposal since at least late 2011, cancelled their contract only earlier this year after being told White's purported use of “current world's best practice” was a charade.

“We want to clarify this urgently. At Evonik, we are committed to ensuring our products are labelled, used and disposed of correctly.”

“We have never had any business relationships or dealings with [Bradbury] or [White]. We have approached the EPA to request further information and will conduct our own investigation,” the spokesperson said.

A spokesperson for Evonik Australia Pty Ltd, a subsidiary of the German chemical conglomerate, said the company did not know why a container allegedly containing 175 kilograms of its product was found in an Epping warehouse.

“The amount of product entering the front door of its Campbellfield premises was staggering. It was coming from NSW, Queensland, South Australia,” an industry insider said. “It was physically impossible for Bradbury to handle that much.”

Operating at its maximum processing capacity of 40,000 litres a day, it would have taken Bradbury years to clear the stockpiles.

While EPA inspectors check to ensure operators are working within their licence – for example, that a facility is storing only the permitted amount of chemicals on-site – it does not check the volume of products entering a facility on any given day.

Exploiting these gaps, the syndicate was able to make tens of millions of litres of chemical waste simply disappear between 2013 and 2018.

It was not until late December 2018, when the stashes were first discovered stacked floor-to-ceiling in warehouses around Melbourne, and buried in shallow holes on White’s property in Kaniva, that the EPA “found” the "missing" chemicals.

By then, a huge industrial blaze at a stockpile had erupted in West Footscray, spewing toxic smoke across the city. Another factory in Campbellfield caught fire in April this year.

The West Footscray factory fire. Credit:Matt O'Dwyer

Does not compute

The EPA failed to notice the explosion in “black market” waste activity partly because it did not have the capacity to analyse the information it was gleaning from the legitimate market. If staff had punched its transaction monitoring data into a graph, they would have noticed a glaring sign that something was not right.

The Hazardous Waste in Australia report from 2019, commissioned by the Commonwealth Department of the Environment and Energy, used the same state-based data to retrospectively identify a major disruption in the legitimate market. The analysis found that reported activity in the solvent market plunged 60 per cent between 2014 and 2015 in Victoria, NSW, Queensland and South Australia.

“It is quite staggering so much material could just fall out of the system. It didn’t just disappear one year, it disappeared and didn’t come back,” says Latimer, who wrote the report. “The figures suggest that a national syndicate is almost certainly operating.”

The EPA has refused to comment on this, saying only: “EPA has made a number of significant improvements to its data, analytics and intelligence capabilities”.

Among the improvements was “establishing a data/analytics unit and bigger intelligence function with increased resources and more intelligence analysts focused on waste crime,” chief executive Dr Cathy Wilkinson said.

Ignored warnings, missed opportunities

The exposure of the biggest toxic waste-dumping syndicate to ever operate in Victoria, perhaps Australia, came on August 30, 2018 in the wake of a devastating industrial fire at a warehouse in West Footscray.

Only days earlier, White had packed the property with hundreds of chemical drums, 1000-litre plastic containers and acetylene tanks.

The blaze, which took 750 firefighters more than two weeks to extinguish, spread a plume of toxic smoke across the western suburbs, forced the closure of schools and businesses and caused widespread damage to nearby waterways.

Dozens of firefighters have reported serious illnesses after being exposed to the contamination. An unknown number of residents may also have been affected.

Firefighters Jason Dale, Kat Dunell and Adrian Lovelace, who were part of the crew tasked to fight the chemical fire at West Footscray last year. Credit:Christopher Hopkins

The cause of the fire is yet to be determined.

Victoria Police had reported White to the EPA in October 2016 after a raid in Epping turned up a chemical stockpile. The EPA did not respond to the intelligence and two years later, the same warehouse would be identified as one of the nine “dump” properties leased to White.

The EPA, which had licensed White to run an acetylene cylinder recycling and disposal business since late 2011, also had no idea the tanks were actually ending up in pits outside Kaniva.

As White's operation ramped up, he leased a fleet of trucks, forklifts and other heavy vehicles to handle what had become by then a massive illicit transport and stockpiling system.

Increasingly brazen, he put the word out to trusted 'clients' that he would ask no questions and expect no paperwork about the material being picked up provided it was in anonymous, unmarked containers, a source said.

Graham White sold his Wallan home for about $620,000.

In late 2017, Victoria Police warned the EPA for a second time that White was potentially involved in an illegal chemical operation, following a separate investigation into his collection of firearms.

White had been indulging a passion for American muscle cars, horror memorabilia and, more relevantly, guns - building a false wall in his bathroom that contained an arsenal of illegal weaponry including a machine gun.

The EPA maintains they were instructed by police not to attend any properties associated with White, in case they interfered with the investigation. Police sources dispute this account, saying the EPA was only warned away from White's home in Wallan and the Kaniva property.

In late July 2018, police raided the Kaniva property looking for guns. They took EPA officers with them, who noted signs that toxic chemical or industrial waste could be buried on the property.

Locked gate: the land in Kaniva owned by Graham Leslie White that contains a massive toxic chemical dump. Credit:Joe Armao

With White now marked as a potential player, the EPA and local council staged an inspection of a West Footscray property he had been linked to. But, as per official policy at the time, White was notified in advance and took the opportunity to empty the warehouse.

He soon returned the stash to the same premises. Three weeks later, on August 30, 2018, the property exploded into one of the worst industrial blazes in two decades.

White, cut off from the Kaniva dump site and under pressure, tried to offer several million dollars to underworld-linked waste operators to dispose of his other stashes, sources say.

But the net was closing. In the wake of the fire, the EPA, WorkSafe and emergency services launched an investigation that uncovered in December 2018 nine other dump sites leased to White in Epping and Campbellfield.

Bradbury Industrial Services' involvement escaped notice for several months more, despite a history with the EPA going back to 2013 when it was caught stockpiling 40,000 litres of chemicals in an unlicensed warehouse.

In fact, White attempted to hire Bradbury to handle the clean-up operation he was now being forced to plan by the regulators, according to documents obtained by The Age through freedom of information. The decision was ultimately vetoed after WorkSafe found another unsanctioned supply depot connected to Bradbury in January 2019, which the company was forced to empty.

The connection between White and Bradbury was beginning to come into focus.

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The EPA, facing up to the long-term and systemic manipulation of the waste industry and its own compliance systems, launched Operation Hydrogen to investigate what it called the appearance of "highly coordinated ... highly organised illegal activity".

The Bradbury chemical processing plant was caught by the EPA violating its licence in March, which was suspended. In April, the factory was destroyed in a blaze started by an industrial accident during an attempt to reduce the amount of chemicals on-site.

That incident led to the revelation that millions of litres of chemicals discovered in four other warehouse properties in Craigieburn and Campbellfield, in fact, belonged to Bradbury.

All told, the syndicate had been dumping at the sprawling rural block in Kaniva and at least 14 city warehouses. About 60 per cent of what has been tested in the stockpiles are highly flammable liquid solvents, the rest a toxic soup of other dangerous chemicals, as well as industrial waste including gas cylinders and the explosive triggers used in airbags.

The site of the chemical fire in West Footscray / Tottenham. Credit:Justin McManus

Since the exposure of the syndicate, White, who did not respond to requests for comment, has been jailed and then released for amassing a stockpile of firearms. Bradbury folded and went into liquidation.

WorkSafe and the EPA have seized control of all the dump sites amid promises they will make those responsible pay for the clean-up. The bill, which will almost certainly be carried by the taxpayer, has so far cost $100 million and could spiral up to $230 million, according to some estimates.

White and his associates at Bradbury have not been charged with any criminal offence over the chemical dumps. Investigations are still being conducted by the EPA, WorkSafe and Victoria's coroner, among others.

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The exposure of the syndicate, and particularly the two serious fires, has led to a crackdown on the industry, with promises of new jail terms and stiff fines for those who create illegal dumps.

The industry is still rife with rumours about stockpiles in other warehouses and rural burial sites. The EPA, however, cites ongoing investigations in refusing to comment on how things were allowed to get to this state.

“We’re delivering major reforms to EPA’s systems, processes and capabilities - enabling us to take tougher action to combat waste crime,” Dr Cathy Wilkinson said.

“EPA is committed to pursuing those engaging in waste crime with the full force of the law.”