Browsing: Site contamination

An EPA Victoria contaminated sites strategy released today vaguely outlines a four-year work program but doesn't deliver urgently-needed certainty, according to a leading contaminated sites lawyer.

After rejecting Email Pty Ltd's voluntary proposal to clean up a contaminated site in a Sydney suburb, the NSW EPA has now issued it with a mandatory order to prepare a remediation plan and have it reviewed by an accredited auditor.

Almost 1,000 potentially contaminated sites have been reported to the NSW EPA since late 2009 – compared to just 500 notifications over the entire previous decade, says the state's new State of the Environment Report.

• Former NSW environment boss to lead EPBC committee on CSG and coal mines
  
• Two more landfill gas projects cleared to create CFI credits
  
• Recalcitrant landfill operator finally hands over levy payments
  
• WA Parliament seeks urgent increase in sandalwood harvesting penalties
  
• NSW issues guidelines on hazardous ground gases

The NSW EPA negotiated almost 400 Pollution Reduction Programs in 2012, while derelict mines might be the State's largest category of contamination liability, says a wide-ranging Auditor-General's report on agency performance in delivering environmental programs.

A NSW court has rejected a developer's arguments that stockpiling and capping contaminated soil does not constitute treating it and ruled that the proposed earthworks on a former OneSteel site requires an EIS.

WA Treasurer Troy Buswell has described the successful clean-up of extensive lead pollution in Esperance as the largest remediation project ever undertaken in the state.

A bill before the WA Parliament will require miners to pay a levy into a new fund that supports the remediation of abandoned mines.

• Shell potentially liable for contamination: EPA Tasmania
  
• RET will work without a carbon price: Coalition
  
• Renewables agency open to innovative grant options

Shell Oil received a site contamination report in 1999 for a service station and didn't pass it on to the site owner, but that hasn't stopped a tribunal ruling the owner is a legitimate recipient of an EPA investigation notice.