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Asbestos, Legacy Landfills, and Council’s Role in Managing Contaminated Land with Malcolm Adrien
246 Plays3 months ago
Malcolm Adrien is an environmental scientist with 14 years’ experience in the environmental consulting and contaminated land sector. He managed several consultancies in the Newcastle region before he made the switch to local government in 2023 where he took on the newly created role at Maitland City Council as the Senior Contaminated Land Officer.
Malcolm has a strong background in contaminated site assessment, remediation, environmental monitoring and is also an EIANZ CEnvP for Site Contamination & SafeWork NSW Independent Licensed Asbestos Assessor.
In this episode, Malcolm Adrien shares his journey from environmental consulting to his current role in local government.
You will learn about the complexities of managing contaminated land within a local council's jurisdiction, including the challenges of dealing with historic landfills and unexpected contamination in development projects.
Malcolm discusses his work on the Anambah Landfill, offering insights into the remediation strategies being implemented to manage this site. He also touches on the importance of early intervention in contaminated land management and the value of having strong technical expertise within local councils.
For those interested in asbestos management, Malcolm explains the regulatory requirements in New South Wales and shares practical advice for handling asbestos in various scenarios. The episode wraps up with Malcolm's tips for young professionals aiming to build a career in the contaminated land sector.
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Are you a local NSW council member looking for more resources like this?
You are invited to join the Local Government NSW Contaminated Land Network!
Local Government NSW (LGNSW) hosts a free, online network for council staff on the topic of contaminated land. The network includes an online forum for collaboration, information sharing and announcements about contaminated land regulation, guidance and training opportunities. Monthly meetings are held on themes that were set by the network participants, with presentations from regulators, technical experts, and case studies by councils.
Since the contaminated land network commenced in December 2023, more than 50% of NSW councils have joined, with over 200 participants. Feedback shows that councils are benefitting greatly from the network meetings and discussion on the platform, and we are pleased to invite you to join us.
To join the network, please use this link: https://lgsa.wufoo.com/forms/w1rf0os910rxyl6/
The Contaminated Land Network forms part of a project called “Councils Managing Contaminated Land Together” funded by the NSW Environment Protection Authority (NSW EPA) to support capacity building and informed decision-making by those involved in contaminated land management in councils. The project also comprises a webpage with up-to-date information and links to resources, which can be accessed here.
We hope to see you on the network soon!
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Transcript
Introduction to Contamination Station Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to Contamination Station, safer environment together, a New South Wales EPA funded podcast. In these episodes, you'll hear from those working to implement contaminated land policies and procedures at the local level by sharing our stories, frustrations, wins and losses. Our aim is for this podcast to become a repository of information that will support those currently working to combat contaminated land and for those yet to come.
00:00:30
Speaker
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the host and the guest as individuals and do not necessarily reflect those of the New South Wales EPA or any other organisation.
Meet Malcolm Adrian, Environmental Scientist
00:00:42
Speaker
In today's episode, I'm joined by Malcolm Adrian. Mal is an environmental scientist with 14 years experience in the environmental consulting and contaminated land sector. He managed several consultancies in Newcastle region before he made the switch to local government in 2023, where he took on the newly created role at Maitland City Council as a senior contaminated land officer.
00:01:04
Speaker
Malcolm has a strong background in contaminated site assessment, remediation, environmental monitoring, and he's also an EAINZ CENVP for site contamination and safe work in New South Wales, independent licensed asbestos assessor. And that's a bit of a mouthful that you've got an awful lot of accreditations to your name there, Mal. And thank you so much for being on the show today. It's a pleasure to be here.
Career Journey and Anambar Landfill Project
00:01:28
Speaker
So can you tell us a bit about your journey from managing environmental consultancies to your current role with the Maitland City Council? Yeah, sure. I started as a graduate on the BHP cleanup in 2010. That was my my first gig out of uni, just doing some environmental monitoring for the Hunter River remediation project.
00:01:45
Speaker
that sort of ran for about a year and then I went up to a local consultancy in Maitland where I was there for about three years. That was my first time working with Maitland City Council. Ironically, i one of the projects that I started working on was the Anambar Landfill, which had been decided at the time there was some that something needed to be done with it. and In the end, when I came back to Maitland City Council, that was the primary reason the role was created to deal with the Anambar Landfill.
00:02:10
Speaker
That was a bit of coming full circle after 12 years of starting to work on that and working with Council and and then looping back into actually getting to a point where I had the technical ability to to try and push that project forward a bit better. Yeah, so I sort of bounced from a few different consultancies and I ended up doing some asbestos work for a few years. I was an asbestos assessor and doing a lot of hospital decommissioning of boiler rooms and tribal asbestos works.
00:02:33
Speaker
and Then I went back to contaminated land consulting and and started to move up into more ah senior positions. and Then I went to a consultancy in Maitland where I was the environmental services manager and had quite a lot to do with with Maitland City Council as their material classifications in general um investigations and So I had a pretty good understanding of what council's needs were before I came into the role just from my prior experience of dealing with council and their projects.
Becoming a Licensed Asbestos Assessor
00:02:59
Speaker
Can you tell me a bit more about the process to become a licensed asbestos assessor and what sort of work does that involve? So asbestos assessor license, the requirements for an asbestos assessor, tertiary education, either health, construction or science, and then two years a minimum of two years experience on the job. It's quite a broad criteria and they seem to really assess it as a case by case basis. I think the other requirement is you don't necessarily have to have tertiary qualifications, but you need to have at least five years experience in the job. So generally you you really have to be working under another asbestos assessor to get your asbestos assessor license.
00:03:35
Speaker
and You can't do friable works until you have an asbestos assessor license, but you can work on friable jobs under the direction of ah ah a friable license asbestos assessor. The day-to-day work of that is a lot of asbestos air monitoring, asbestos soil testing and soil sampling, doing test pitting and in general asbestos investigations. That's for the for the more of the contaminated land component. But then when you're talking about the the hazardous material side of things, so identifying asbestos-containing materials, PCBs, you old light fittings, lead paints, any kind of those kind of materials that need to be put on a register for, especially for buildings pre-1990. You find that asbestos is a very common material and a lot of the time it's it's mishandled when when refits and refurbs have been done over the years. and A lot of the time, you get holes get dug in the ground and the stuff gets buried and out of sight, out of mind until you somebody stumbles across it 10, 20, 30 years later and now it costs a fortune to get rid of and it's a very big problem.
00:04:32
Speaker
and Quite often, the money is coming from the people who didn't make the problem in the first place. That's right. You especially see it in a lot of civil jobs. so We see it on on subdivisions all the time too where an old gully has just been filled in with some some rubbish that was lying around and nobody really thought anything of it at the time. You probably find that aerial photography wasn't wasn't nearly as advanced as it is now. You don't tend to to notice those kinds of things in the little gully behind a row of trees somewhere.
00:04:58
Speaker
And then 20 years later, the subdivision comes in and there's a couple of hundred tons of asbestos waste or an old and all turkey turkey shed or chook shed that's been smashed and put it filled into a dam. So what are some of the primary challenges you face in managing contaminated land within Maitland City Council's jurisdiction?
Challenges in Maitland: Material Import and Flood Mounds
00:05:14
Speaker
One of the biggest issues we have is just the sheer volume of material that's coming into the LGA from outside the LGA. you know there's There's truck and dogs running from Sydney and semi-trailers running from Sydney and and sort of a little bit a little bit confused about why material comes up in in such such large volumes because obviously it's expensive to transport material. So if you're transporting material
00:05:36
Speaker
you know 200 kilometers. It just doesn't make sense to me why some of these some of these trucks are coming up, unless they're backloading because they're already coming up here for for another job, which would make sense. But we have got a lot of flood mounds because obviously, we're on a floodplain here. So there's opportunities for people to try and hide material in flood mounds as they get built up. So that's that keeps me quite busy just trying to keep an eye on what material comes in through there. And of course, ah as part of the development assessment process, we don't really get the certificates for that imported material until the material has already been deposited.
00:06:06
Speaker
and They basically provide that at the end of the of the DA process to get their occupation or construction certificates or whatever the process requires. so We can't actually look at that until it's already been brought into the site. and people ah A lot of the time, people who are who are having these projects built, they're not consultants or they not don't have a civil background, so they don't really understand what they're getting when material is coming in. so If they start seeing bricks and and the odd bit of stuff in it that they might might not raise any eyebrows to them. But obviously, if there's you know bricks and ceramics and other potential demolition waste in there, that's a problem because usually when you start finding that stuff, you'll start finding asbestos and it doesn't take much asbestos to yeah be tracked around a site and cause ah was a tiny little bit of asbestos contamination to blow out into a huge project, which which might make a job financially unviable. and then
00:06:51
Speaker
Yeah. And at what point then, and and I guess how does the council end up becoming aware of the contaminated material that's being brought onto the site? Is there, do you get the test results from the loads as they have come in, but obviously retrospectively, or are you doing, requiring testing on site? No. All we get is the, at the end of the process, when they've brought all the material in, they'll submit to us the, the material import certificates. So a resource recovery order of animal and animal report.
00:07:18
Speaker
And at that point, we can only do a visual inspection of the material and look at the certificates and try and see if they make any sense. But really, we don't. It's very difficult to keep on top of that. I think it would probably be more beneficial if we were able to to look at the materials and certificates to approve for import before they come into a site. But the amount of work that would that would take would be phenomenal. You'd need a dedicated team just to go through that material and you'd need people who were who were trained to be able to yeah identify that certificates were accurate and that they were being issued under the appropriate resource recovery order. Yeah, that would be a ah very large
Managing Anambar Landfill: Plans and Community Engagement
00:07:53
Speaker
job. So you presented a case study ah recently at the Hunter JO where you talked about the Anabar landfill, as you've already mentioned. Can you share more about this site and what's being done to manage that site in particular?
00:08:05
Speaker
So, the Anambar Landfill was a ah historic council-run landfill just in Roundabout Rutherford in in the mainland LGA. It wasn't actually officially a landfill. It was shut by the Land and Environment Court in 1993 and we opened a new licensed facility and that site was basically just mothballed and sat there since its closure in 1993. There have been some We've done a lot of monitoring and a lot of assessment of the site over the years. There were some attempts to put in some remediation biofiltration trenches to try and mitigate any any gas migration offsite. Those trenches have had mixed results in in their efficacy just because they've filled with water and they just sort of weren't weren't really engineered to the specification that would have been ideal for that site.
00:08:49
Speaker
So the current plan is to reinstall new trenches at the moment. But effectively, what happened is is ah early 2023, we engaged a contaminated land consultant to undertake a data gap analysis and a full review of the site's history. And then we went on a bit of a journey with that consultant to try and find out, close all the data gaps. So look at ground gas, do some 3D modeling of ground gas, leachate balance.
00:09:12
Speaker
just looking at where we're getting hot spots, where we're getting potential off-site migration, which we have identified. There's another parcel of land directly adjacent that we own, which has got some ground gas coming out of it. This has all and been been made public through the EPA declaration of significantly contaminated land process, which is currently underway. We haven't finalised that yet, but what we're doing is we're looking to enter into a a draft voluntary management agreement with the EPA for how we're going to manage the site.
00:09:40
Speaker
and We've got some interim works underway. we've just put our We had to do a land use options assessment as one of our remediation option pathways. and we We went out and did some community consultation and we've just been through a ah period of about a month where we had that all up for the community to make comment on um the plans for the landfill and its future. Obviously, the the future landform and and land use will dictate how the site needs to be remediated.
00:10:05
Speaker
And so that's been an important part of the process. So at the moment, we're just moving into interim works to really determine how we're going to remediate that site long-term. So we've got a draft remediation plan at the moment, which has had its first pass. It's currently under review by our site auditor and our consultants. And obviously that's a bit of a process. Yeah. Are you able to elaborate on any of the options that you're looking into? Yeah, sure. So as I said, that was all up for for public display over the last couple of weeks. so I think to to really understand the land use options that we'll put forward, we have to sort of take a little bit of a step back and understand the the ah the limitations of the site like that. so you know you've got It's about 20 hectares site. It sort of slopes from from north to south. The elevation changes a little bit by a couple of meters as you get down to the bottom. so
00:10:55
Speaker
There's a housing estate built directly off the to the north of it. There's a aged care of the fires village built directly off to the to the east of it. So we've got sensitive receptors nearby. We've tried to take into consideration that the location the elevation You've got geotechnical constraints, obviously the material is uncompacted or not uniformly compacted waste across the site filled in cells. There's an uneven cap thickness across the top of the site which requires some ah some adjustments.
00:11:25
Speaker
So with all those things together, it means that you know you can't build anything too heavy and you can't you may not be able to build a big pad or a big concrete slab to it to put a big building on. There's noise and vibration constraints so due to the proximity to residences. So you know looking at remedial methods, we have to be careful about anything that's going to cause excessive vibration. Playing with 30 plus year old waste. There's odor implications if we try and... you know If we have to open up the ground and there's test bits that are digging into old waste. There's the contents of the landfill itself, which is obviously 30 year plus old mixed waste, so we don't really want to be handling that. It'd be quite dangerous as ah some of the substances in there if you were to to unearth them and start to move them around and and expose them to the ah to the atmosphere.
00:12:09
Speaker
so The plan is to to try and re-grade the cap. There are some areas of the site where it's relatively undeveloped or it wasn't filled with waste. so We've looked at potentially some light industrial on that part of the site and it's consistent with development that's across the road from that part of the site. We've looked at ah a solar array. We've had quite an extensive study done on a solar farm there. so we We know we've got connections to the grid.
00:12:33
Speaker
Because the solar farm is quite light, that's a a good option for parts of the site where we don't really have to worry too much about geotechnical suitability. And then we are going to look at some potential ground improvement technologies down on the lower southwestern part of the site, which is probably the furthest away from any residence. And we might be looking at some ground improvement technology there. So we might look at some dynamic compaction or potentially some fly ash grouting or a combination of those.
00:12:57
Speaker
What would you say some of the key lessons that you've learned through this process that could potentially be passed on to other councils when they're considering how to manage contaminated sites?
Registry of Known Contaminated Sites
00:13:08
Speaker
Well, one thing I think has been pretty apparent to me is that we've got a history of these these sites that we all seem to know about. it like you know We've got an old night for soil facility, we've got an old gas works, we've got the old landfill, we've got another old gas works, but that's been built over and it's it's actually under the 1985 unhealthy building land actor, I think it was at the time.
00:13:28
Speaker
So that site is sort of off the off the register now but everybody knows about these sites and we don't really have a ah firm register in place up until recently, we didn't anyway, on where these sites are, what the nature of the contamination is and a record of what's been done with them over the years.
00:13:44
Speaker
so You tend to find that the information can be quite segmented and hard to find. and A lot of the information is kept by people who may have moved on from the organization because it was their one pet project. and so When those people leave council, that information goes with them as well. so It's really important to speak to the people who've been around for a long time.
00:14:02
Speaker
But to also to make sure that these sites that everybody sort of knows about are on a register somewhere and that they are being looked at as a potential liability or as something that needs to be managed. So another big part of my role was to to get the contaminated land register established. A lot of work had already been done on that by the Hunter JO and Lot Search. And they basically had the data report together and we had a consultant review that. And from that, we generated our our contaminated land layer, which is consists of of three layers, a known layer, a potential layer, and then the original original analysis risk register, which was what the two layers were produced from, which is not quite as rote. It's got a lot more information, but it's got too much information to the point where it's not really usable, because if you look at it, everything's contaminated according to that register.
00:14:47
Speaker
And that's probably something that this needs to be appreciated when you're talking about contaminated land management, is that everywhere is potentially contaminated. And if you pick up a consultant report, they'll say, oh, well, there's some ash on the ground or there's there's a brick sticking out of the ground or there's some filling here. So it's that's potential for contamination. And it's true that that is potential for contamination. And yeah everywhere we put a bucket into the ground, we tend to dig something up that we're not expecting to find.
00:15:12
Speaker
So, having those areas mapped, having them on a register that can be accessible by the wider group is really important. It's important so that people who don't usually consider that stuff can have an easy way to find that information if they need to.
00:15:26
Speaker
yeah We did the same process up here with our councils and it was a great process to go to. Unfortunately, it hasn't the ongoing management of that system hasn't been adopted, so it's basically been mothballed, but at the time it was done, it was it was very helpful. and this this I guess this ties into something else that we discussed around your interest in getting councils on board with the technical detail of contaminated land management. and how they can avoid getting into sticky situations with early intervention. Can you talk me through a bit more about that? Sure. So I think one thing that's been noticeable to some of the people that I've worked with is that I've been in council a long time. is
00:16:05
Speaker
But tend we tend to move a bit quicker when you come from the private sector because you're used to dealing with the pressures of time and money from clients who are and paying quite a ah quite a lot to get these projects done. So what I found is we we often run into these problems and when we run into them, we're sort of a little bit um mystified about how we go forward with it because the people on the job weren't really planning for those kind of problems to arise. But they're the same kind of problems that we run into all the time. So we really should be ready for those when we run into them and we really need to have a plan.
00:16:36
Speaker
of attack on how we're going to deal with those. And so early intervention is key. If you can see these problems coming or anticipate that they could potentially be coming before they get to the problem point, then that saves you a whole lot of time and energy, especially when you've got crews and traffic control and machinery and stuff sitting around on standby because you've run into something that you probably should have had a contingency ready for to run into.
00:17:00
Speaker
And the same when it comes to you know excavations. Anytime you're going to excavate, you're goingnna you going to run into areas where you find unexpected stuff. And a great deal of what we do at Councillor's excavation because we're constantly upgrading roads and widening things.
Managing Unexpected Waste Discoveries
00:17:12
Speaker
And ah an intricate knowledge of the of the waste framework is really critical, I think, when it comes to to moving quickly on that stuff. If you run into material that you weren't expecting or that doesn't have ah an appropriate classification, you need to be able to find the the classification that material fits in. And you need to know the people to be able to get rid of that quickly if that's going to slow things down. And that takes background knowledge on on you know what what instruments are available to you to try and navigate those situations and you know who do you need to call when you run into those things. So having ah having somebody around who who's got a good, strong technical background in those areas, I think will help smooth those projects out.
00:17:51
Speaker
Are there any remediation strategies or technologies that you've found to be most effective when dealing with contaminated land?
Remediation Technologies: Cost-Effective Strategies
00:17:58
Speaker
As far as remediation technologies go, there's some really interesting and awesome you know high-tech stuff. But the reality of it is that that stuff tends to be really expensive. And so it doesn't often become very practical to use those kinds of remediation methods. So you can be talking about installing like a perm a permeable reactive barrier where you've got a a substance in the ground that sort of mixes with the material or with the contaminants that come through and changes its properties.
00:18:23
Speaker
You've got thermal treatment and and all kinds of really cool sort of you high-tech or high-energy processes. But at the end of the day, that the most common stuff we see is just is to excavate and dispose or cap and contain. And that's because of the cost factor more than anything else. And so we don't tend to see much more than cap and contain really as far as you know high-tech remediation methods. They're just not really employed in day-to-day stuff that we see in our LGA.
00:18:51
Speaker
Yeah, and hopefully, I guess in the future, as prices come down for some of these other technologies, we will see the use of them more widely. Obviously, that's a better solution. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it depends on the size. Obviously, you know we've we've got We're looking at doing a gas pilot trial out at our Anambalean field. So that's that's probably something a little bit more high tech than what I'm used to dealing with, which is digging stuff out of the ground and sending it away in a truck. So I think yeah those obviously when you're dealing with ground gas, ah the situation changes quite but differently from dealing with soils and water. Yeah, I think that's probably the most advanced tech we'll have going around as far as remediation goes in the LGA for the immediate future.
00:19:28
Speaker
Yeah, that's exciting that you're getting to use that.
Asbestos Management Regulations
00:19:30
Speaker
Yeah. So touching on your experience as a licensed asbestos assessor, what are the key regulatory requirements for asbestos management in New South Wales? Well, the the two main codes of practice are the code of practice on how to safely manage asbestos in the workplace and how to safely remove asbestos. And so they really lay out the scenario. So one of them is really more around material management. So if you've got asbestos containing materials on site,
00:19:54
Speaker
whether that's in building materials or whatever hell it may be, how do you manage that? And and that's more around the you know having registers and and having a hazmat register so that when you have penetrative works done, you're not endangering your staff. And then you've got the how to safely remove asbestos, which is more geared around the probably more the contaminated land consulting or the asbestos removal, the asbestos remediation sort of thing. So those two are really the source of truth in in New South Wales and they're basically built off the Australian Code of Practice anyway, which is pretty much word for word, almost the same thing.
00:20:23
Speaker
And then, of course, each council has its own asbestos um management procedure, and I'm sure most places will as well. And basically, the asbestos management procedure just says work to the code of practice and make sure that you've got appropriately trained and qualified people handling the asbestos, so which is a little bit yeah it's It's funny if you want to talk about you know appropriately trained and competent people will in the Code of Practice, you can you don't need any any kind of qualifications to remove under 10 square metres. So they can be a little bit contradictory in that manner. So other than the Code of Practice, are there i guess any other things that you've noticed, maybe even undocumented stuff, that is going to help ensure that the council is compliant and protecting public health when it comes to asbestos?
00:21:09
Speaker
We're pretty diligent with our asbestos works around Maitland. you know it's It's not uncommon to run into asbestos, especially in the civil guys with the old Telstra pits, which are all all asbestos material. And you you run into old conduits and pipes in the ground all the time, but it's pretty much, you know it's it's not an uncommon occurrence for them. So they're used to dealing with that. We usually have, we've got a couple of asbestos removalist license plumbers that do a lot of works. Whenever they find one of those, they just call those guys and it's pretty standard day-to-day thing. They just come in and handle it.
00:21:38
Speaker
yeah know We do try to be diligent when we find it's best to see it illegally dumped. There's quite a lot of illegal dumping, obviously. It's along many of the back roads as well. So whenever we find that material, we have it isolated. Usually the fire brigade go in and and wrap it or spray it, glue it down, and then we ah we engage a hygienist or we engage a removalist to come out and remove it as quickly as possible so that less time around for the public to be exposed to it.
Advice for Aspiring Council Experts
00:22:02
Speaker
So what would you say to somebody in our industry, a young person who is keen to work for a council but wants to be that technical expert such as yourself for a fora council? What would be your advice to them for the earlier stages of their career before they got to council?
00:22:21
Speaker
I think it'd be really difficult to... It's difficult to get a really high technical level in the contaminated land sector from strictly inside council. I think you really have to be out in the field working on on highly technical projects. Sometimes with bigger companies is is the pathway to get that. So you know when I was at Kleinfelder, I was on the AGL cleanup, which is probably the biggest detailed site investigation I've ever been on. And those are the kind of big projects where you really get to cut your teeth on a really difficult and and technical and even potentially dangerous job. And those kinds of projects will will give you the background to to operate in just about any sector, whether it's public or private, um with confidence that you know what you're doing. Because if you can work inside ah an active power plan or something like that, or a big oil and gas plan or inside ah you know some facility where that it's quite a dangerous area to work in and there's risks and there's a lot of contamination and then you move yourself over into an area where it's
00:23:16
Speaker
you know, much lower level problems and much lower level contamination. It's easier to be to be proficient once you've come from those areas, but I just don't think you get the exposure to the types of work that you do ah you'd want to get experience in in your early career unless you're in that private sector, unfortunately. And do you have any recommendations for young professionals coming up through through the ranks in terms of additional training or some some good mentoring that you've had throughout your career or anything like that?
00:23:45
Speaker
but The Algor events are a ah great way to meet and greet and to stay in touch with people. so um you know I've been attending a lot of those Algor events since I was a grad and I sort of dropped off them for a few years, especially during COVID.
00:23:57
Speaker
But they're a fantastic place to go and see what your peers are doing and what other people in the industry are doing and just to get exposed to to the different ideas and different people and just to catch up regularly. So you' you'll network really well at those types of events and it's a good opportunity to to hear from regulators as well, which you don't often hear from when you're in your early career because the regulators are quite active in that and that area.
00:24:21
Speaker
So I would say it's important to network early and also it just depends on you really got to find somebody that you can work well with, work well under who understands the way that your brain thinks and the way that you work. And so ah you know I've been been really lucky over the years. I've had a few people that mentored me and I've been really grateful for.
00:24:42
Speaker
and ah I'm sure I never would have would have made it as far as I did without them, and without their patience and without their guidance. so if you you know If you find someone who you really click with, you know form a friendship with them and try and maintain that, you know I'm still really close with my former grads. I still speak to them fairly regularly, a few of them. We we we keep in touch. you know It's good to see them. Some of them had a ah year experience when I started working with them. Now, some of them are four, five, six-year level and they're moving into mid-level roles. They're doing really well and it's good to see that.
00:25:10
Speaker
that you know them progressing through their career and we try and keep in touch. And yeah if they've got a problem or if I've got a problem, sometimes we'll run it by each other just ah as a sounding board. And I think that's a really valuable resource to have. Yeah, definitely. that Those connections that you can just thrash some ideas around with a pretty laid back environment is always really helpful. Yep.
00:25:30
Speaker
So to wrap things up today, is there any advice that you would give to local council members involved with the management of contaminated land in New South Wales or we to councillors, I guess, who are maybe making some of the strategic decisions? I think if you you would speak to a lot of the people that I work with day in, day out and some of the people who are a bit closer to the ground and dealing with a lot of these problems, they'll tell you the value that having somebody with ah with a strong technical consulting background will bring to a council in being able to to just navigate legislative rules and regulations, understand it how they're interpreted by different disciplines, where they need the guidance and in what way, especially when dealing with that unexpected fines type of issues where things are just popping up and you've got to move quickly.
Need for More Technical Experts in Councils
00:26:12
Speaker
I just think that
00:26:14
Speaker
Council needs to be needs to have a stronger technical background section or more technical experts. It's you know our team in the environment sustainability team. We've got ah quite a few ex-consultants in it. We've got two ecologists who are fantastic and myself, who comes from an environment background. And being able to deal with consultants as ex-consultants, I think, gives us a little bit more understanding of where they're coming from and how to how to maybe manage them or how to give them what they're asking for or find the middle ground.
00:26:41
Speaker
when cancelling the consultants and the developers or with the landowners. So I think there's there's more room in council for for strong technical experts and I think that's undervalued at the moment. Thank you so much for being my guest today, Malcolm. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you. I've really enjoyed the conversation and love the fact that we were able to get into the technical detail for today's conversation. It's always a really, really great thing for me to to be able to put that out to our audience. So that wraps up this episode of Contaminated Station Podcast. Thank you for listening.
00:27:15
Speaker
You've been listening to Contamination Station, Safer Environment Together, an EPA funded podcast hosted by Chanel Gleason Wiley. We hope you've enjoyed our chat and been inspired to continue working towards a safer environment together. We would love for you to stick around for the next episode. So keep those headphones on, grab another cuppa and settle in for more insightful stories.