Tweed Water Alliance Inc (TWA) was formed in 2017 by a dedicated group of community members after a former politician lodged an application to mine groundwater for bottling near Uki.
The community was concerned about this large-scale extraction in a quiet rural area, the use of heavy vehicle trucking on narrow, winding, country roads and unsustainable one-use bottling. TWA conducted a thorough investigation into existing water mining operations in the Tweed area, finding numerous entrenched breaches of their consent conditions, in one case dating back well over a decade.
In 2019, through dogged persistence, strong community lobbying, plus media and government attention, the authorisation to extract groundwater for bottling was removed from Tweed Shire Council’s (TSC) Local Environment Plan (LEP). No new applications for water mining would be accepted. Existing operators could only increase, or modify, their extraction after positive independent environmental impact studies, traffic studies, and the satisfaction of TSC that local amenity would not be adversely affected. To date, no attempts to modify the four operations, at Kunghur, Urliup, Kynnumboon, and Nobby’s Creek, have been approved.
TWA’s position is that water mining should not be permitted at all. Our members remain committed to monitoring and reporting of non-compliance by water miners, and that Council applies consistent regulatory enforcement to prevent or mitigate any negative impacts on the community.
Tweed’s groundwater, much of which sustains internationally recognised World Heritage areas, must be protected from unfettered, unregulated water extraction for bottling, an industry that comprehensively fails the public interest test.
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