Clean-up could offer a billion dollar land boost

Turning sites currently deemed too polluted to use into land safe for development could add several billion dollars a year to the Australian economy at a time when many economic indicators are slowing or falling, says Professor Ravi Naidu, Managing Director of CRC CARE.

“There are numerous examples where old industrial land, once cleaned up and made safe, gains dramatically in value. Sydney’s Homebush Bay and Melbourne’s Docklands are cases in point, where old industrial land is now the focus of residential and other forms of development,” Prof. Naidu says.
Indeed, if Labor follows up on commitments made before the last election to make more publicly owned land available for residential development, Prof. Naidu says there are likely to be contaminated sites currently under Commonwealth control that could potentially be released as part of the Rudd Government’s plan.

“We estimate that the Australian economy could gain as much as $1.8 billion a year, mainly from carrying out risk assessment, managing and cleaning up old industrial urban land which is now either lying idle or else in low-value uses owing to the fact it may be potentially contaminated.”

Professor Naidu says that much of this land may in fact be unused due to potential contamination, rather than actual risk to the community — and this needs to be assessed using the latest scientific methods. “The key issue is whether the contamination is capable of reaching and harming the public via water, air, dust or the food supply. If not, then it is possible to manage the site so that it is safe for high-value uses such as residential or business,” he says.

“This is far less costly than digging up the site and carting the contamination away for burial elsewhere — which may, in many cases, be quite unnecessary if there is a negligible risk.”

As cities have grown, urban areas have spread over former industrial sites, creating a potential — but often unknown — contamination hazard for residents. The same applies on the urban fringe, where spreading suburbs frequently encroach on potentially contaminated former farming and mine sites.
In most cases, Australia’s environmental authorities still require the owners of contaminated sites to dig up the soil and cart it away or treat affected groundwater. However, in cases where the contamination cannot reach people, or where it may be decreasing due to the natural action of soil microbes or soil chemistry, the cost of converting a site from uninhabitable to habitable may be far lower, Prof. Naidu says.

“The first step is to measure the contaminants which are present and to establish whether they are in a form which poses a risk — or one which does not. For example, one form of arsenic is highly toxic, while another is far less so. Others still may be locked up by nano-clay particles in the soil and unable to reach people.

“If the risk is found to be low, then steps can be taken to manage it until it is completely safe both to people and the environment. This is often preferable to simply moving the threat elsewhere, where it will be a problem in time to come. Some of our most hazardous sites are old tips and waste dumps, once on the edge of the city, but now — due to urban expansion — well within the settled area.”

It is important not to create toxic problems for future generations to solve — but to clean them up now, Prof. Naidu says.

One of the obstacles to this is the lack of a consistent national approach to ‘legacy issues’ — or who is responsible for the ongoing management of a site, if the ownership changes hands. “Our federal and state governments need to agree on how these issues are to be handled in the long term — otherwise people will simply avoid doing the assessment and clean-up, and Australia will gain neither the health nor the economic benefits.”

Moreover, Prof. Naidu says, each state has its own system for auditing such contaminated sites and this can be quite cumbersome. A unified approach to auditing contaminated sites would be cost effective, besides making remediation much more rapid. It is also important to build community confidence in the new methods of risk assessment and clean-up, he adds.

“Overall, Australia needs to view contamination assessment and clean-up as a major economic opportunity rather than a costly chore. Cleaning up a site is a major investment in the future, and can result in rapid economic, social and environmental gains.”

The technologies used to clean up Australian sites also have huge export potential in Asia, where many countries are facing major health crises due to pollution from rapid industrial development — and the risk of declining life expectancy as a result.

“Contamination is a worldwide issue, affecting all people in all countries. By being among the first to solve a problem we can generate major new export income and employment by helping other countries deal with it.”