NSW EPA scraps new asbestos regulation changes

NSW EPA scraps new asbestos regulation changes

The New South Wales branch of the Environmental Protection Authority has decided against new safety regulations after concerning levels of asbestos were uncovered in landscaping products made from building waste.

In 2019, more than half of the facilities in NSW producing the material were found to have unacceptably high levels of asbestos. The material is known as recovered fines and is often found at the bottom of skip bins when collecting demolition, building and various construction waste.

In NSW, some companies repurpose the material as a soil or a sand substitute. Per NSW legislation, it should be free of asbestos, but a number of compliance checks in 2019 showed that it often wasn’t.

The EPA deemed the risk unacceptable and began the process of developing new regulations, which included six months of industry consultation to best understand the industry and their requirements.

The EPA has announced this week that it will not proceed with the new regulations. The new system would have required the waste companies to set out record keeping processes as well as sampling and testing processes to ensure the material was free of contaminants before it was able to be used by the public.

The environmental safety watchdog has now said it will focus on educating companies involved in processing the material in a campaign aimed at banning asbestos from skip bins.

“If companies do the wrong thing they will be held to account,” the EPA has said in a statement.

The Australian Council of Recycling has welcomed the change, explaining that the proposed updates to legislation would have been expensive and difficult to implement, as well as meaning recyclable materials would have been diverted to landfills.

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