The Coal-ash Community Alliance has teamed up with Wilco Envirotech and Chantelle Baistow, a PhD candidate from UNSW, to bring together community members to envisage what Lake Macquarie could look like once the coal-ash dams around the Lake are empty.

In July, a small group of local residents used a 3D printer to create pottery from clay mixed with coal-ash. While they had fun with clay and technology, they learned about the roughly 100 million tons of coal-ash stored in unlined dams around Lake Macquarie and the threat this poses to the Lake and its animals and plants. And they heard about opportunities to use this ash to produce useful products in manufacturing processes that create highly skilled jobs for power station workers and others.

The ceramics made at the July workshop will be on exhibition at this workshop, where the film ‘Regenerating Australia’ by award-winning author and filmmaker Damon Gameau (That Sugar Film) will be shown. This film was made by Regen Studios in partnership with WWF-Australia and its Innovate to Regenerate Campaign. It illustrates what can be achieved by 2030 if we start now.

After the film screening, the audience will embark on some fun activities to envisage what we would like to see around Lake Macquarie by 2030 and to plot ways to get there – starting here and now.

The workshop is free and open to the public, but please register via Humanitix.