“Green Lead” – oxymoron or future vision? - Slide Show
15 November 2005
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 Elizabeth O’Brien

Manager, Global Lead Advice and Support Service (GLASS)

The Lead Education and Abatement Design (LEAD) Group Incorporated

In 1991, a local community group in Sydney’s Inner West campaigned for a blood lead survey which found that 51% of the preschool children in Summer Hill were lead poisoned – and Elizabeth O’Brien’s child Harrison was the worst. Fourteen years later we now know that 51% of urban children in India and 33% in China are lead poisoned. Meanwhile Australia continues to be the largest lead exporter, and the industry is re-badging itself as ‘green’ on the basis that their product is 100% recyclable.

Elizabeth O’Brien heads up a small Australia-based NGO (The LEAD Group) that devotes most of its shoestring resources to providing information and advice about the prevention and management of lead poisoning to concerned citizens from across the globe. If the lead industry (and the State Governments that rake in royalties from lead mining) want to convince the community that they’re truly green, O’Brien will argue in this presentation, shouldn’t they look at re-directing some of their resources to supporting services such as those provided by GLASS?

Elizabeth O’Brien has a science degree from Sydney University and graduate diplomas in education and health education.

She has represented the Australian and global communities in consultation processes ranging from National Environment Protection Measures on air toxics, contaminated sites and shortly product stewardship, to the OECD report on lead and the United Nations Partnership on Cleaner Fuels and Vehicles. Elizabeth has presented at nearly every international lead conference in the past dozen years and presented the Washington conference conclusions in New York to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development in 1994.

Elizabeth was awarded the United Nations of Australia Association (UNAA) World Environment Day (WED) Award for Outstanding Service to the Environment in 2004.

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