Across Derrimut, Sunshine, Laverton and Campbellfield, six massive warehouses are filled with waste from insolvent recycler SKM, according to one of the warehouse owners.
It says SKM rented the warehouses to stockpile the material, but the recycler has been taken over by liquidators – and it is no longer paying rent on the warehouses.
Marwood Construction project co-ordinator Carly Whitington says that two years ago the company agreed to lease its Derrimut warehouse to SKM.
Once the lease was signed, she says, “they just filled it up, locked the doors and that was it”.
“It took them about eight weeks to fill it up,” she says.
“We asked them to start emptying it [last year] and they emptied a little bit – and then we caught them putting more stuff into the warehouse.”
Ms Whitington is speaking on behalf of a group of companies – the largest is freight forwarder Tasman Logistics – that own six warehouses she says are filled with similar amounts of material.
The Supreme Court declared SKM insolvent and liquidators are now in control of the company.
Creditors include the Commonwealth Bank – which the
Australian Financial Review reported this week was owed about $60 million.
SKM had been processing recycling material for more than 30 councils around Victoria – but abruptly stopped taking household waste last month.
– The Age
