As chief scientist says state should drop ‘zero tolerance’, former EPA official says many problems could be solved during demolition process
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A former senior New South Wales environment watchdog officer says more needs to be done to stop asbestos from being mixed into waste materials as the state government considers overhauling the regime for dealing with the toxic contaminant.
Jason Scarborough, who led an Environment Protection Authority (EPA) investigation that found potentially contaminated soil fill could have been applied to land across the state, said many of these issues could be solved at the time of demolition.
Scarborough’s comments come as the government considers a report from New South Wales’s chief scientist, Prof Hugh Durrant-Whyte, that recommends the state drop its “zero-tolerance” approach to reusing waste materials that contain asbestos.
The chief scientist’s report on the management of asbestos in recovered fines and recovered materials was published this week after being handed to the Minns government in December.
Among the report’s nine recommendations is that the government implement a “risk-based” approach to managing asbestos in recovered materials at each stage of the supply chain, including at waste facilities.
Scarborough said it would be a “good start” if the government accepted the recommendations, but it could go further by implementing stricter requirements for “source control”.
“I believe that 90% or more of the issues can be resolved [by disassembling buildings] in an orderly fashion, to not only identify contaminants and remove them, but also to maximise the recovery of resources,” he said.
“I’m not just talking about big sticks, I’m also talking about incentives for people to invest the time and the effort to ensure that all asbestos-containing materials are removed from a structure before they start dismantling it.”
The chief scientist has also recommended the NSW government follow Western Australia in adopting a new “threshold” at which asbestos-contaminated waste can be reused.
Currently, any waste containing asbestos at any concentration is sent to landfill, which the report says is “not sustainable in the context of very limited landfill capacity”.
“Say you’ve had 200 cubic meters of crushed concrete and someone’s found a 10-cent piece of asbestos – the whole thing becomes asbestos waste,” Scarborough said.
The report said mixed construction and demolition waste was “likely to contain asbestos in small or trace amounts” and the zero-tolerance approach to its management was “unable to rule out the presence of asbestos”.
Scarborough said the zero-tolerance approach had “always been impossible to comply with” and he was pleased the report had recommended this rule be changed.
The chief scientist has proposed to allow waste containing low levels of asbestos (0.001% or 10mg of asbestos per kilogram of material) to be reused in certain circumstances.
The report was published more than three years after the then-Coalition government asked the office of the chief scientist to provide independent advice into the safe and effective management of asbestos in reusable waste material in NSW.
At the time, the EPA was considering tightening the regulations governing a cheap soil fill known as “recovered fines”, which is made from processing construction and demolition waste after all large recyclable material has been removed.
Two EPA investigations – one in 2019 and the one led by Scarborough in 2013 – had found widespread breaches by industry meant potentially contaminated recovered fines might have been applied to land including parks and childcare centres.
Guardian Australia first revealed that that EPA had known for a more than a decade that producers of recovered fines were failing to comply with rules to limit the spread of asbestos and other contaminants into the community.
The EPA walked away from a proposal to tighten regulations in 2022 after it received pushback from the waste industry.
At the time, the Coalition government backed the industry and asked the office of the chief scientist to prepare its report instead.
An EPA spokesperson on Thursday said the government had received the report and was considering its recommendations.
Separately, the EPA has committed to reviewing the regulations of recovered fines, including testing and sampling requirements.