By Paul Perkins*
Of all the big environmental issues, the sleeper,
and the most urgent for our future health and wellbeing as a
society, is contamination. The truth being gradually exposed as we
redevelop our cities and farms, probe our waterways and take
increasingly sensitive samples of the air we breathe, is that we're
immersed in a soup of potential carcinogens, mutagens and
toxins.
It is estimated that Australia has between 80,000
and 100,000 contaminated sites. Every old garage or fuel dump,
every sheep or cattle dip, most old mine sites, factories and
munitions stores, old municipal tips, contain their share of
pollutants.
Blood tests have shown that almost every one of us
- including infants - can carry a lifelong cargo of persistent
organic pollutants and heavy metals. These go with us into the
cemetery, then re-mobilise in the groundwater. We are ourselves
contaminated sites.
Australia has some magnificent people in its
Environmental Protection Agencies and industry who are doing their
very best to remedy this dangerous legacy. But the effort is
hampered by high costs, limited resources and by the fact that,
scientifically, we still don't fully understand the scale and scope
of what we're dealing with.
Contamination of soil, water and air is our next
great environmental challenge.
What we need most urgently are better tools for
identifying the toxins that surround us, for assessing how risky to
people or the environment they are, specific ways to
neutralize them that don't cost an arm and a leg - or involve
shifting the problem elsewhere - and ways to monitor the site
afterwards.
We also need more reliable policies, given that
much of what we have is borrowed from overseas and has limited
relevance to our environment.
This is a great challenge, worthy of Australia's
best scientific minds, many of whom are now gathering under a new
research effort based in Adelaide called the Co-operative Research
Centre for Contamination Assessment and Remediation of the
Environment (CRC CARE). Working with a diverse group of industry
and regulator partners, they aim to develop world's best methods
for assessing risk and the most advanced clean-up methods and
products. This in turn will lead to better standards and
regulation, broader awareness of the issue - and prevention of
future pollution.
Apart from our health and that of our environment,
there's a serious bottom line here. Proper risk assessment and
clean-up can turn a site worth next-to-nothing into a safe
development worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.
Urban renewal can go ahead with confidence.
Risk assessment and remediation can potentially
save Australia up to $2 billion by 2010 in clean-up costs, as well
as generating an estimated return of $4 billion from land which is
now low-value or even unusable.
Then there's the export potential: clean-up is
becoming big business worldwide. Germany, for example, plans
to spend $US2.5 billion in the next five years on remediating old
sites. Hungary puts its clean-up bill at $2 billion, South Korea
and Switzerland at $3 billion apiece. Asia has an estimated 5
million contaminated sites, which it is struggling to render
safe.
We're familiar with the injunction to clean up
Australia. By being among the world's first to develop safe,
economical solutions to this problem, Australia positions itself to
capture a significant slice of this huge new market for technology,
knowhow and IP.
Ends
- Paul Perkins is the Chair of the
Co-operative Research Centre for Contamination Assessment and
Remediation of the Environment (CRC CARE) and chair of the Barton
Group, an alliance of CEOs responsible for the national environment
industry action agenda
