Member Profile: Alliance for a Clean Environment (ACE), Western Australia

Since its establishment as a non-profit in 1996 to successfully oppose a brickworks in the Swan Valley in Perth, Australia, Alliance for a Clean Environment (ACE) has now become one of the peak NGOS in Western Australia (WA) advocating for environmental health and justice and providing support to many communities threatened by the impacts of industrial and chemical pollution.

ACE is committed to upholding "Community Right to Know" (as defined under International Human Rights treaties and conventions to which Australia is signatory), on the impacts to civil society and the environment from pollution and chemicals.

As such ACE provides critical community right to know public forums for the WA community on a range of environmental health issues. Highlights have included WA's first Contaminated Sites Forum in 1999 and where ACE was instrumental in bringing about the long awaited Contaminated Sites Act of 2003 which went into force in 2006. The law is designed to ensure that contaminated sites are reported, investigated, and cleaned up.

ACE also co-hosted in 2003, WA's first Environmental Health Public Forum - Towards an Environmental Health Plan for WA and in 2002 WA's first ever Environmental Justice Forum - Not in Anyone's Backyard.

More recently in 2010/11, ACE provided forums on the public health impacts of incinerator technologies, the fossil fuel industry, particularly coal seam gas and liquefied natural gas (LNG) processing and also from the use of pesticides.

Members of ACE, who are all volunteers and rely only on donations for its operations, currently work on key campaigns that include the protection of children's environmental health, air quality and waste.

Recently, ACE was instrumental in the withdrawal of 4 proposed incineration technologies in the Eastern Region of Perth.