The Greens will push for stronger laws to prevent groundwater pollution and seek assurances that failures highlighted by the Koppers case are not being repeated elsewhere in the territory.
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Revelations about the pollution of groundwater underneath the former Koppers Wood Products timber treatment plant in Hume have raised broader concerns from Greens MLA Shane Rattenbury about environmental protection in the ACT.
The water was contaminated with up to 2430 times the safe limit of the carcinogenic chemical hexavalent chromium, known for its association with the Erin Brockovich case in the United States.
The Koppers pollution, which is believed to be isolated to the 20 hectare site, exposed a series of failures by authorities in enforcing the multinational corporation's compliance with environmental law.
That included failing to enforce regular groundwater monitoring at the site between 1998 and 2005, the year the company closed the plant.
The Environment Protection Authority did not conduct annual checks of Koppers' compliance with their legally-binding environmental authorisation, a set of conditions designed to protect the ACT from the company's use of copper, chrome, and arsenic to treat timber for the production of Koppers logs.
Greens MLA Shane Rattenbury says he will write to Environment Minister Simon Corbell to ensure the problems will not be repeated.
He said an assessment of the EPA could potentially be done through a performance audit by the ACT Auditor-General.
"The key question to be asking is what procedures have been put in place to ensure that this situation of non-enforcement will not be repeated, that's the assurance I will be seeking," he said.
Mr Rattenbury said the case underlined the importance of ensuring the EPA was adequately resourced to do the job the public expected.
He said the Greens will also be pushing for legislative reform to strengthen the protection of groundwater in the ACT.
"This example certainly highlights that we need to amend the legislation to include the provisions to protect groundwater," he said.
"It's a loophole that needs to be addressed by updating the legislation."
Koppers stopped production at the site in 2005, but never cleaned the contaminated groundwater due to a contractual dispute with the new buyer of the land.
The EPA has obtained no testing at the site since a comprehensive environmental analysis of the site in 2007, and advice from Koppers' consultants in 2010.
Despite that, they say they remain confident the contamination is isolated to the block Koppers formerly operated on.
That approach has attracted criticism from former head of the Department of Capital Territory's Environmental Protection Unit in the 1980s, Bob Dunn, who helped prepare the ACT for Koppers' arrival.
