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Defining the Problem: John Hunt on Sustainable Remediation
106 Plays15 days ago
John Hunt is a renowned expert in contaminated land remediation and Senior Technical Adviser at Ventia. John has qualifications in geology and is Certified Site Contamination Specialist with more than 30 years’ experience in contaminated site assessment and remediation.
He started in the industry in 1992 with Groundwater Technology Australia as a contamination consultant. After 5 years with ADI Limited remediating former Defence munitions manufacturing sites, he joined Thiess Services (the precursor of Ventia’s remediation business) in 2000.
John has worked on many of Australia’s iconic remediation projects including the 2000 Olympics site, the Mortlake gasworks, the Rhodes Peninsula dioxin sites and Orica’s Botany Car Park remediation. Most recently he has become involved in PFAS remediation, a problem he had originally planned to leave to the next generation of practitioners to solve. He is a past president of ALGA and a long term member of the Sustainable Remediation Forum of Australia and New Zealand (SuRF ANZ), a specialist interest group of ALGA.
In this episode, John delves into the importance of problem definition in contaminated land management. He explains how diverse disciplines in geology, science, and engineering come together to tackle environmental challenges and emphasizes that miscommunication between these fields can lead to incorrect remediation approaches.
John discusses the evolution of sustainability in remediation, explaining how sustainable solutions are highly context-specific and depend on the environmental, social, and economic conditions of a site. He highlights the role of guidelines like ISO 18504 in providing a framework for sustainable remediation and encourages councils to integrate sustainability considerations early in project planning.
You will also gain insights from John's experiences on iconic Australian projects like the Sydney Olympics site and Rhodes Peninsula, where consultation with communities shaped effective and practical remediation strategies. He wraps up with advice for councils on staying up to date with emerging challenges, such as PFAS contamination and climate change impacts, and stresses the importance of forward-looking cost analysis in remediation planning.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Purpose
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.
Introducing Expert John Hunt
00:00:30
Speaker
In today's episode, I'm joined by John Hunt, a renowned expert in contaminated land remediation and CMU technical advisor adventeer. John has qualifications in geology and is a certified site contamination specialist with more than 30 years experience in contaminated site assessment and remediation.
00:00:49
Speaker
He started in the industry in 1992 with Groundwater Technology Australia as a contamination consultant. And after five years with ADI Limited remediating former defense munitions at manufacturing sites, he joined T services, which was the precursor of Ventia's remediation business. That was back in the year 2000.
00:01:11
Speaker
John has worked on many of Australia's iconic remediation projects, including the 2000 Olympics site, and mort lake gaswork the the Rhodes Peninsula Dioxin sites, and Orica's Botany Carpark remediation. Most recently, he's become involved in PFAS remediation, a problem he had originally planned to lead to the next generation of practitioners to solve.
00:01:35
Speaker
He is a past president of ALGA and a long-term member of the Sustainable Remediation Forum of Australia and New Zealand, or SURF ANZ, a specialist interest group of ALGA. 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.
00:02:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to this episode of Contamination Station, an EPA-funded podcast. I'm your host, Chanel Gleason-Willie. Our guest today is John Hunt. Hi, John. Thanks so much for your time today. Hello, Chanel. Thanks for the invitation. Great to be here. Not a problem.
Defining Problems in Environmental Projects
00:02:18
Speaker
So you're the first person in the environmental industry who I've heard described their role as problem definition, uncertainty analysis, and solutions development. I would expect that most people in the industry would have a component of these things in their day-to-day roles, but I really love that you state it as your role. So how does your role differ from other standard roles in the CLM industry?
00:02:47
Speaker
Well, Chanel, this all came to me in a flash one day when an engineer, a very clever remediation engineer walked into my office with a great heap of reports and said, John, I don't understand any of this. Tell me what the problem is. And I suddenly realized that I knew what the problem was and I was equipped to define the problem because of my geological training, whereas the engineer wasn't because he had been trained differently.
00:03:14
Speaker
So quite a few things flowed from this. Number one, I realised that specialists in the environmental field are actually taught how to think differently about solving problems. And when you realise this, of course, you realise there's plenty of potential for miscommunication when, say, scientists and engineers are talking.
00:03:39
Speaker
The reason that I could define the problem was I had a geological background and I was used to being in a situation where I was dealing with incomplete data, like very incomplete data, just sparse points in the subsurface and trying to define problems and solutions knowing that most of the time I'd be wrong.
00:04:01
Speaker
Whereas the engineers were actually defining solutions knowing that they had to be right 99.9999% of the time, otherwise the bridge or the building would fall down. Some other things that flowed from this, of course, were that you actually need quite a wide range of diverse disciplines to solve environmental problems in a range of science type backgrounds and a range of engineering disciplines.
00:04:27
Speaker
And of course, the communications issue isn't just between scientists and engineers. It also takes in communities and regulators. So that's where it all started. And I've sort of stuck in that role a lot in my career because I realized if the problem is not defined correctly, the engineers will still solve it comprehensively. It'll just be the wrong solution. So it's very important in my experience that you actually take the time to properly define the problem.
00:04:59
Speaker
One practical implication of this, which ah has come to mind is that when you do a contaminated site assessment and you think you now know what the problem is and you're ready to implement the solution, in fact, you may not have collected the right data to design the solution.
John's Geology Experience and Approach
00:05:18
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for that. It's such an interesting concept to to think of your role as as that sort of overarching problem solver.
00:05:26
Speaker
And that brings me to your career where you've spanned coal and petroleum geology and contaminated site assessment and remediation. So how has this diverse experience shaped your approach to remediating and managing contaminated lands?
00:05:44
Speaker
Well, in a couple of important ways, um I think the role of geology I just spoke about and particularly dealing with uncertainty, knowing that I was going to be wrong most of the time, perhaps I might be right one in 50 or one in 100 times. And this is in the context of spending millions of dollars to say drill an oil or gas well.
00:06:07
Speaker
So it's very important in the environmental industry to define the uncertainty around the environmental issues. We face the uncertainty around defining whether there is a problem there in the first place and the uncertainties around remediation or remediation designed to solve the problems.
00:06:26
Speaker
The second thing is that a lot of what I did in oil and gas and coal was relevant to environmental anyway because the associated geochemistry of hydrocarbons, of course, ah is directly relevant. You mentioned earlier that you worked in a variety of different geology fields, well sub-fields, I guess, but that exploration was where you spent a fair amount of time, is that correct?
00:06:52
Speaker
That's correct, it was more on the front end of resource discovery but in a regional setting where I had to deal with very large amounts of data. I guess geology in oil and gas and coal is very data intensive these days and you quickly learn how to manage data and how to interpret data.
00:07:16
Speaker
And that's another skill that's directly transferable into the environmental field because it's becoming a lot more data intensive, I think, as time goes on. A lot of your roles have seemed to be, I guess, taking different ways of thinking and different approaches to things and communicating that effectively to you know parties in different industries or regulators.
Impact of National Guidance on Local Governments
00:07:42
Speaker
And this brings me to my next question, which was that you have spent a lot of time communicating with regulators and have contributed to the development of national remediation guidance through CRC Care.
00:07:54
Speaker
Can you tell me more about the impact that this has had on local government responsibilities? In terms of local government, the most direct thing is that there is now some national guidance on remediation methods.
00:08:09
Speaker
I may have written some of the guidance for Exeter remediation methods. Before that existed in the Australian context, you could still find that information, but it was a lot harder to actually dig it up. Of course, you had to get onto the internet and you had to know what you were looking at. So the CRC care guidelines have the basics and they have the references that you can go to. And that's probably the main relevance to um to local government.
00:08:37
Speaker
and I guess so an emerging trend both in local government but across the sector or all the different sectors in our industry is
Sustainability in Land Management Approaches
00:08:47
Speaker
sustainability. so I wanted to um to have a chat about sustainability today because that's something that you're quite a strong advocate for in the CLM space.
00:08:56
Speaker
Now sustainability is a growing focus in remediation and it's i relatively new in that space. ah From your recent presentation that I listened to last week, which was fantastic by the way, where sustainability was defined as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. What aspects of CLM would you consider a currently unsustainable?
00:09:24
Speaker
well That's an interesting question. Chanel, it assumes that some aspects are unsustainable, of course, and perhaps I won't i won't venture in there, but just for a bit of background, I find a lot of people, and this can be um yeah clients and just the general public and consultants and even remediation specialists think about sustainability as a silver bullet a method that will fix everything everywhere.
00:09:55
Speaker
My view on sustainability is that it's a relative thing. It's basically we anchored to a time and a place. And what was sustainable 50 years ago may not be sustainable today. For instance, think about ah a country, a small town gas works and a city gas works.
00:10:14
Speaker
The City Gasworks is a large site on the waterfront. It has a large value as a read of redevelopment property and so it can sustain a very large remediation effort. You may in fact be able to dig up and destroy the contaminants on the site. Whereas the Country Gasworks is a very small site in the back blocks.
00:10:38
Speaker
It's got zero value. It's got a negative value. It doesn't have much development potential at all. So the sustainable solution for the country gas works will be quite different to the sustainable solution for the city gas works.
00:10:54
Speaker
Sustainability is really just ah a comparison of the viable alternatives for a place and a time to figure out which one does the best jobs in terms of environmental, economic and social outcomes.
00:11:10
Speaker
So asking what practices are unsustainable is um he's fairly difficult to answer. However, there is quite a lot of interest at the moment internationally and across Australia on the topic of soil going to landfill because large amounts of low-level contaminated soil currently does go to landfill.
00:11:35
Speaker
That's because of several things. One is that many development sites are on a very tight timeline and the only viable short-term solution is to send soil to landfill. To actually treat the soil and reuse it requires time and space and that equals cost and time and space aren't available.
00:11:57
Speaker
The second thing is that many waste regulation ah or many state waste regulations basically classify material leaving site as waste. And it's very difficult to get out of the waste classification for reuse. And so that makes the simplest thing to do with it is to put it to landfill.
00:12:16
Speaker
One state has um overcome this to some extent. In South Australia there is a ah land bank where you can send low-level contaminated soil and basically it's treated in such a way that it can be available for other uses.
00:12:34
Speaker
Yeah, the dig and dump practice has been used for such a long time. And as you said, it sometimes it is actually the most sustainable option, but often it's, I guess, through lack of time or um funding or imagination as to why we end up utilizing that
ISO 18504 and Sustainable Remediation
00:12:50
Speaker
so often. But there's actually a new guideline, the ISO standard on sustainable remediation that might but that does help with that problem.
00:12:58
Speaker
So how is this guideline relevant to councils and what's in the guideline? And for those who are interested, it's ISO 18504.
00:13:11
Speaker
ah Yeah, this guideline has been around for a little while in that it was published as an international standard 18504, possibly in 2019 or something like that. It's probably a ah sign of um some of the problems we face in that it accidentally fell off the cart when it came time to getting it turned into Australian standard.
00:13:36
Speaker
ah It sort of got accidentally sidelined somewhere and after a couple of years we inquired what was happening and the process started again. It's not going to give you the answer to your problem in terms of which is the most sustainable method to use. It's more like how to determine which is the most sustainable method to use. Essentially, it gives you some examples and a list of indicators for sustainability metrics and the methodology for comparing your alternatives.
00:14:09
Speaker
Importantly, it says that the amount of effort involved should be proportional to the size of the problem. So if you can determine simply by a qualitative sort of assessment as to what's the most sustainable option, um then do it that way. Don't think that you've got to go through big tables and numbers and weightings and all that sort of thing to determine what's the most sustainable option.
00:14:34
Speaker
If it's a big problem, however, and there's a lot of um ah say money hanging off the outcome or social outcomes, it may be worthwhile doing a quite an extensive analysis. At the end of the day, it's usually fairly simple because once you've determined what the practicable solutions are, and that's in terms of what can be done technically and what can be done financially, that usually won't be a very long list. And at that stage, it's just a matter of comparing the outcomes across the indicators that you've selected to represent the environmental, economic and social outcomes of the project.
Integrating Sustainability into Projects
00:15:17
Speaker
I should point out there's a couple of other tools around. One is that CRC Care has put out a guideline on cost benefit and sustainability analysis. It was developed for, i'd I'd say, the big end of town in terms of resource projects. And probably it's a bit cumbersome to apply to a lot of the small projects that we have to make decisions about for remediation.
00:15:44
Speaker
The other is that the consultant Ramble has put out some freeware called Shure, which is a program to communicate the results of sustainability analysis. It's yeah designed to basically inform communities, I think, and to inform other stakeholders as to what the options are and has plenty of good graphics in it to illustrate ah what's being compared and what the outcomes are.
00:16:12
Speaker
What practical steps can be taken to integrate sustainable practices into contaminated land management projects? Well, a couple of practical steps. Number one is to act early. You'll get the best benefits if you start considering sustainability right at the outset of a project. If it involves development, it should be considered in the development planning stage, not just for the remediation.
00:16:39
Speaker
There's a couple of different ways people look at sustainability. In in the ah US, the regulator there has taken the approach that they will determine what the solution is going to be, and then you will determine how to green the solution. So they call that green in the sustainable remediation.
00:16:57
Speaker
And that's quite a different concept to sustainable remediation as defined in the ISO. As I say, the best outcomes in terms of sustainability are ah going to be achieved when you consider the development and the remediation together. The development may require basements to be dug and the characteristics of the land contamination may show that there are better places to put basements in that you disturb less contaminated soil and have less soil to send to landfill. Those sort of overarching considerations.
00:17:34
Speaker
you won't achieve those sort of benefits if you define the the development and then say, okay, now let's have a sustainable remediation to go along with it because you've already put a lot of constraints on the remediation. Staying up to date, of course, is very important because, as you mentioned, regulations are forever changing and there are legal implications in terms of compliance requirements.
00:18:00
Speaker
There are a number of professional associations that cater for this. They put out ah newsletters and do online training and conferences. And of course there are some of the university's run land contamination courses. The associations that come to mind are the Australasian Land and Groundwater Association or ALGA, which deals with land and and groundwater ah contamination and remediation.
00:18:27
Speaker
ah It also has a number of specialist interest groups, such as the Sustainable Remediation Forum of Australia and New Zealand, or CIRF ANZ. There's also the Environmental Institute of Australia and New Zealand, the EIANZ, which has a broader environmental management remit.
00:18:48
Speaker
So it deals so with land management more broadly and also has groups that deal with climate change and environmental offsets and that sort of thing. and The EIANZ also hosts the accreditation scheme for the environmental industry. So I'm a contaminated site, an accredited, contaminated site specialist, credits people in climate change and other areas.
00:19:17
Speaker
And then there is the Environmental Health Australia Organisation or EHA, which focuses on environmental health professionals across all levels of government. ah It also runs online training and annual conferences.
Education and Courses in Land Management
00:19:33
Speaker
In terms of and the universities, the UTS in Sydney runs a contaminated site assessment, ah remediation and management um module that has a number of two to three day courses covering different aspects of contaminated land and groundwater management, such as assessment and remediation and risk assessment.
00:19:57
Speaker
and Something to remember but with remediation where the remediation part of a project um is either happening at the front end or concurrently with a development that moves into the construction phase. If you're you're needing a sustainability rating such as an ISCA rating, then some of the innovations that can potentially be brought into the remediation phase can actually utilise towards your design, your construction credits or ratings that you you need for your project. And I believe that you've got to potentially some things coming up with ISCA soon, John.
00:20:34
Speaker
ISCA is an organisation that ALGA has worked with in the past. We had a conference probably around the time of COVID or maybe it was the conference before COVID when we actually had a session on sustainability with ISCA to basically look at how the two intersected and as a result of that ALGA was asked to review the ISCA rating scheme for the in-ground part of the development projects.
00:21:02
Speaker
which of course is the the part where um remediation will occur and it's the part where development and remediation can overlap and at the planning stage you can move things around. By the time you've done your development plan of course if you then want to consider remediation it's often too hard and there's too much momentum and it's going to cost too much and take too much time to rework.
00:21:27
Speaker
The ISCA rating scheme with its in-ground components is very important as well in terms of understanding remediation sustainability and getting the maximum sustainable benefits out of a ah project. I've got ah a bit of a tricky question for you now. Do you think that the needs of future generations include remediating all sites to the current guideline or is that really being overly cautious and unsustainable?
00:21:55
Speaker
Well, considering future generations and remediating sites to current guidelines and whether they're overly cautious and unsustainable, that's a pretty tricky question. And you'll only really know the answer to that if you have a crystal ball or if you want to wait for a few years or decades.
00:22:15
Speaker
The ah contaminant that comes to mind for that question is PFAS, of course. And while PFAS has been around for a long time, and we've known the basics for a long time, perhaps 50 years or more, it's only in the last decade that we've really realized the extent of the problem and started to investigate in detail what the real risks are and what the needs for remediation are. Understandably, in the absence of information, the regulators are taking a very cautious approach because it's easy to make a criterion less stringent but very difficult to make it more stringent.
00:22:58
Speaker
Nonetheless, that is what's happening in some areas. And as we find out more on the toxicology of PFAS, then essentially the regulators are moving the criteria around to match the the level of knowledge.
00:23:15
Speaker
I think it is a case where you have to take a very precautionary approach to regulation. And as I said, we'll only really know sometime in the future as to whether we've been too cautious or not.
00:23:29
Speaker
ah Hopefully it won't turn out the very low levels of PFAS that are around us today lead to the demise of the human population sometime in the future because of unforeseen health effects or fertility effects or something of that nature.
00:23:47
Speaker
I don't really think of ah the process as one of trade-offs when considering the main sustainability indicators, which are cost social and environmental outcomes. Usually the process takes care of that along the way. By the time you've pruned out what's not practicable, i.e. what can't financially be done or technically be done, you end up with a fairly small list of options.
00:24:16
Speaker
And then you simply compare the social, environmental and economic outcomes of those options, one with the other. No solution will have a perfect balance between all three, but some will have better balances. And in my experience, it's not been too difficult to actually separate them.
00:24:38
Speaker
If there's a large amount of money involved because it's a very large project, you may need to go into the differences in minute details, of course. But usually that's not the case. Many problems are fairly simple problems and they lend themselves to simple analyses of sustainability.
00:24:58
Speaker
I would say that people often think financial is not really a fair thing in terms of um sustainability analysis. But in my view, it's it is a very important issue. If I could put a list of alternatives up to solve a problem and know what the real costs would be, that would make decision making a lot simpler. Unfortunately, in the industry, because of the nature of the problems and the amount of uncertainty involved,
00:25:27
Speaker
The solutions that we select often have a very large uncertainty in cost, which creates lots of problems, none the least of being ah commercial and legal problems, of course.
00:25:40
Speaker
But it all comes back down to the fact that the solution's not properly defined, so the costs won't be certain. And it's very important to basically try and put a fence around the the certainty of costs, put a plus and a minus on what you think the costs might be. It's important from all sorts of reasons, of course, not the least of when you're doing development projects and the costs may be critical.
00:26:04
Speaker
You worked on some of the iconic remediation projects around Sydney, such as the Olympic site, Rhodes Peninsula, Orica Botany, Carpark and many others.
Lessons from Major Remediation Projects
00:26:15
Speaker
Can you talk me through the learnings from some of these sites or one of these sites and how they've impacted remediation practices today?
00:26:23
Speaker
Yeah, there have been many lessons learned from the large remediation projects I've been involved with, such as the Olympic sites and the Rhodes Peninsula dioxin projects and the Oricot Botany car park.
00:26:36
Speaker
One important learning of course is the importance of consultation with the affected communities. In the case of all of those projects I've mentioned, there were very large communities that were impacted by those projects in very significant ways, some positive and some negative.
00:26:55
Speaker
and it requires quite a lot of time and effort to actually create the communications with communities and to understand what their concerns are. For instance, on the Rhodes Peninsula, one of the concerns was that the remediated site would generate a lot of dust and there was an established, an older established residential area to the east of the site within 100 metres or so.
00:27:22
Speaker
That kind of surprised us at the time because we thought that the community might be concerned about all sorts of other issues to do with dioxin contamination, for instance. But it illustrated the point that that community was in fact so networking with ah the community at the Mort Lake Gasworks who had been affected by dust from the reinstatement of the site. Many thousands of tons of clean soil had been brought in to cap the site and make it suitable for the the next stage of development. And that had been done ah in a way that had created a lot of dust impacts.
00:27:58
Speaker
ah Having identified that as a problem, it was very, very easy to resolve it simply by going through the process of um you know how the soil would be brought in and placed and agreeing to essentially turf the um the site as that was incrementally done, basically so there would be no dust at all.
00:28:18
Speaker
and committing to that with the community and that essentially um that there was a small cost associated with that but it was um a large concern for the community that was easily addressed and it wouldn't have been identified without a lot of talking and communication and it certainly wasn't the sort of issue that we as the remediators that we thought the community would be concerned about as ah an important problem.
00:28:46
Speaker
The second thing is coming back to cost again. Of course, um a lot of these projects, say the Olympic site project, it was a very, very large project. I think there was 20 million cubic metres of waste on the site that had to be remediated.
00:29:04
Speaker
And if you multiply 20 million by $100 a tonne or cubic metre or $200 or $500, you started talking extremely large amounts of money. And it focused the attention on what could be done given the large amount of waste on the side and the very high cost of doing anything high tech.
00:29:29
Speaker
So um the solution there was to basically keep the waste on site to consolidate it into a number of mounds and to engineer them in such a way that they could be managed. That is the leachate from them could be collected and treated.
00:29:45
Speaker
And any volatile emissions coming out of them could be treated which was done by having engineered biocaps, i.e. caps that the air could get through so that bioremediation could happen in the vegetation route zone as volatiles came out of the piles. And a third thing that's come out of them is the issue of costing.
00:30:06
Speaker
When you're looking at sustainability and economic indicators, and one of them, of course, is the cost of the remediation, a very important cost that's difficult to quantify and sometimes overlooked are future costs. For instance, the Orica Carpark waste encapsulation, which had quite a large amount of chlorinated compounds in an engineered encapsulation, so it had a rubberized liner on the base and the walls and the cap.
00:30:36
Speaker
Basically, it had a design life when it was put in the ground in 1985, and that design life was about 20 years. And sure enough, after 20 years, the compounds in the encapsulation started to be detected in groundwater. So although a significant amount of money had been spent in 1985, an even more significant amount of money had to be spent 20 years later or 25 years later to actually destroy the contaminants.
00:31:05
Speaker
whether the people who designed the encapsulation at the time took that into account, I don't know, but it certainly was a significant amount of money the second time around. I should say that the technology to destroy the compounds hadn't been developed back in 1985 when the encapsulation happened.
00:31:24
Speaker
Another interesting one from that perspective is the Olympic site because the waist amounts of course still exist 25 years later and we had a retrospective session at a conference in 2019 I believe on looking at the the Olympic site 20 years on and would would the same solution still be the solution selected today and was it sustainable?
00:31:47
Speaker
The answer in a nutshell was yes, it would. And it was simply the quantum of the costs that was ah driving it. But there were also a number of issues to do with future costs because there are significant future costs with having that amount of soil, 20 million cubic metres on site in mounds that's generating volatiles and leachate and the cost of actually treating the leachate.
00:32:11
Speaker
Fortunately, the quality of the lead shader has been improving significantly yes so as it usually does for landfill material. Over time, that cost will basically diminish with time.
00:32:26
Speaker
There were some costs that weren't foreseen though, and they were to do with climate change because some of the cutoff walls around the waste mounds can be overtopped by super high tides that are climate change related, and that creates additional leachate to treat. And there's also the rainfall regime on the side has changed, of course. So the amount of water infiltrating through the caps has increased, which amounts to ah additional costs for leachate treatment.
00:32:55
Speaker
So there are any number of lessons that have been learned, but those were some of the important ones that came to mind. The Rhodes Peninsula Dioxin cleanup, and that had some very interesting learnings in terms of consultation and and stakeholders. The project, for those not familiar with it, was actually, I could say, instigated by Greenpeace, pre the 2000 Olympics.
00:33:21
Speaker
because the site was actually adjacent to the 2000 Olympic sites and some of the contaminants on the roads site which had come from a Union carbide plant that made Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. They were also present on the Olympic site and Greenpeace basically twisted the arm of government to promise to clean up the roads peninsula.
00:33:44
Speaker
for the Sydney Olympics. Now the government at the time must have had a crystal wall because they decided it could all be very difficult and take longer and cost more than what everyone thought and actually still be there sort of happening as an eyesore during the Olympics. so They basically undertook it after the Olympics, which in retrospect was pretty wise because there were quite a lot of problems. It took about five years to get consents in place to do it, and then it took about another five or ten years to actually finish the site. So it couldn't have been done in the five years leading up to the Olympics, for instance.
00:34:20
Speaker
At one stage, a contractor was hired to clean up the northern part of the precinct, which was the old Allied feed site. And the contractor proposed a thermal solution that wasn't Stockholm compliant. It didn't treat the dioxin in the off gas using best available technologies.
00:34:42
Speaker
Greenpeace immediately had a campaign running in the local shopping centre handing out flyers with a map of the site with a gun site on it. And you can imagine how that went down.
00:34:54
Speaker
There's all sorts of things that can happen. Politics on these on the big projects can be very ah important as well. The timing of a project with relation to an election cycle and the people running for local or state government can tie themselves to projects either to supporting them or opposing them. Usually there's more more um mileage out of opposing them from a political perspective. That's sad to say.
00:35:20
Speaker
I can think of a project in West Australia where a person running for the Senate in WA who was opposed to contamination opposed the remediation of a contaminated site. And it seemed to be simply to to get air time at the time. With over 30 years in the field, what trends do you see shaping the future of contaminated land management?
Future Trends in Land Management
00:35:44
Speaker
Well, having been in the industry for 30 years, I've certainly seen a few changes over the 30 years. And some of those changes, it's interesting to forecast into the future. For instance, 30 years ago, there were virtually no regulations and very little experience in Australia in the field. And we've gone from a situation of no regulation to quite well-developed and comprehensive regulations And I think that trend will simply continue going into the future as we learn more, our regulations will get more refined. 30 years ago, there were no contaminated land specialists. There were geologists and geophysicists and geotechnical engineers. I even had a ah nuclear radiation physicist, I think, working on the team at one stage.
00:36:38
Speaker
Whereas now we have certified contaminated land practitioners and several universities offering training in the area and um specifically in contaminated land and also many universities basically training environmental graduates.
00:36:58
Speaker
I'd have to say that in the early days when teams, the teams that were put together consisted of a lot of individuals trained in specific areas of science and engineering, that perhaps they had a more hands-on approach to doing the number crunching required that people trained in environmental management don't necessarily have.
00:37:21
Speaker
But that goes back to the the point of needing lots of different specialists from different areas on on teams to solve problems. Thinking about regulation again, the Dutch experience comes to mind when I first started practicing as a consultant in the early 90s.
00:37:41
Speaker
We often defaulted to Dutch criteria for assessment and used them for remediation, which wasn't what they were designed for, simply because we had very few regulations ourselves. So we either defaulted to Europe or the US, and the Europeans were closer to us in regulatory um frameworks, I guess, or yeah the way the way they did things.
00:38:05
Speaker
The Dutch had criteria that essentially represented background numbers for contaminants and they were cleaning up Holland or the Netherlands to those criteria. But after 20 years they'd spent a lot of money and hadn't addressed a lot of problems so they stopped and had a pause and they actually went around the country and systematically assessed what was left to remediate.
00:38:31
Speaker
And they came up with a very large quantity and a very large number in terms of costs using the criteria they were using. And they figured out pretty quickly that they would bankrupt themselves several times over in the next one hundred years if they kept going down that path. So they basically altered their philosophy of remediation quite significantly at that stage.
00:38:54
Speaker
Instead of having lots of sites going down pathways with lawyers involved they by regulation, they group sites together and force them to act cooperatively to solve problems instead of fighting about who had caused the problem when in reality everyone had contributed to the problems.
00:39:14
Speaker
and they integrated their um remediation solutions with development solutions. So if they were going to be treating a groundwater plume, for instance, they combined it with heat extraction to offset the costs of heating buildings in the area because you can extract heat from the water that you're remediating.
00:39:33
Speaker
Now, I don't know that we'll be doing that in Australia, but it does illustrate that it can be very useful to pause and see where where you're going. A case in point here could be this issue of low-level contaminated soil going to landfill and losing it as a resource, which requires yeah a basic rethink of the way waste is regulated.
00:39:57
Speaker
Another development that I can see that that has happened quite extensively over the last couple of decades is the use of nature-based solutions, which are popularly known as bioremediation, which has expanded to include myco-remediation or the use of fungus.
00:40:14
Speaker
and phytoremediation of the use of plants to degrade contaminants. It's not suitable for all contaminants, but slowly, slowly it's being applied to more and more contaminants, including some that supposedly couldn't be bioremediated once upon a time. And this is all being facilitated by advances in ah say environmental microbiology and the use of DNA analysis on microbial communities and that sort of thing.
00:40:44
Speaker
and Professor Mike Mainfield at UNSW specialises in this area and over the course of the last 20 years he's graduated a large number of PhD students who've basically been investigating in that discipline and he's also opened a lab in Australia that does the basic sort of analysis required to do that. So I think that that technology approach will continue ah to expand and be applied more widely into the future.
00:41:14
Speaker
Something else we've talked about already, of course, is the application of sustainability principles to the management and remediation of contamination. I think that will become much more important in the future. At the end of the day, we don't have a bottomless pot of money to throw at problems. And it's important that we put our money where we'll have the best effect. And that doesn't mean to clean up everything everywhere to nothing.
00:41:41
Speaker
How would you suggest councils prepare for emerging challenges like PFAS or climate change impacts on remediation and the I guess the immersion contaminants of the future because PFAS isn't exactly new anymore? Well, thinking about how councils prepare for emerging challenges like PFAS and climate change impacts on remediation,
00:42:04
Speaker
I have to go back to um one of the earlier questions which was how to stay up to date and simply by yeah joining the professional associations that basically cater to the space, staying up to date at least to know what's happening and to know what you don't know and to know where you can go and find out stuff.
00:42:25
Speaker
If you know what you don't know to some extent and you know where to go and find out or who to speak to or who to refer problems to, that's half of the battle. I think internationally and in Australia, most environmental conferences or conferences to do with contaminated land will have a session considering um the future impacts of climate change on remediation.
00:42:49
Speaker
Some of them we've talked about, of course, sea level change and rainfall can have significant impacts on existing remediations and impact the design of future remediations.
00:43:02
Speaker
particularly for landfills and encapsulations where the contaminated material is going to be around for a long time. And for groundwater, of course, because increased rainfall regimes or decreasing rainfall regimes will basically influence the um behaviour of the groundwater in the ground in the first place, not the least being the depth of groundwater.
00:43:24
Speaker
We've talked about the Olympic site and how climate change has impacted that in terms of increased sea levels, overtopping cut-off walls around mounds, which were designed 20 years ago, and and the increased rainfall creating increased leachate due to its infiltration through caps. So landfill caps are important.
00:43:45
Speaker
You've mentored professionals in this industry. What skills do you think are most critical for those involved with contaminated land management and remediation projects?
Essential Skills for Professionals
00:43:55
Speaker
A couple of things come to mind. Number one is that you need to be able to think through the answers to a project long before you go to modelling and yeah you just have tools to actually design things. A lot of the very important basic considerations are and done by thinking through from first principles to the you know the size and shape of a solution.
00:44:22
Speaker
Getting into the details with um numerical analysis and that sort of thing ah is important from a design point of view and from the point of view of costing things, but you need to make sure you're working on the right problem. ah You understand the problem properly and basically have made the right decision in terms of the solution.
00:44:44
Speaker
So um I guess thinking skills only come with time and being mentored by people who've been through the process. Other things that come to mind, of course, are the ability to work in teams. As I've said, many disciplines are required for the teams to solve remediation problems, environmental and contamination problems.
00:45:08
Speaker
And in the last 30 years in the industry, of course, there have been enormous changes in the um tools available to us to solve problems and to design solutions. So you can expect that the ever-changing face of technology and computing in the industry, and I guess AI in the industry, will have a significant impact in years ahead, hopefully a positive one.
00:45:35
Speaker
When I think back to um the 80s when I was working for CSIRO and everything was done by hand, a handful of radical scientists actually had laptops that they were collecting and analyzing data with. The rest of us were basically punching cards and putting them into mainframes. When it came to typing, we had to write by hand and give it to the typing pool and get on the queue and then go through multiple edits.
00:46:04
Speaker
It was very, very unproductive and hopefully the continued advances in technology will make us more and more productive. If you could give New South Wales councils one piece of advice for managing contaminated land more effectively, what would it be? Well, Chanel, if I had one piece of advice to give offices and councils who are dealing with contaminated land, it would be to stay up to date, become active members in one or the other or more than one of the associations, even if it's just to keep an eye on the newsletters and seeing what the topics are in webinars and to yeah make sure you attend the ones that are relevant to the work that you're doing.
00:46:53
Speaker
Be aware it is a fairly complex area that needs a lot of inputs and a lot of players. So there are no, usually there are no quick or easy solutions. And we do have a fairly comprehensive set of procedures in place that have been developed over the last couple of decades through EPA and planning.
00:47:13
Speaker
the processes required to um yeah effectively manage the risks associated with land contamination and remediation and make sure you're familiar with them. ah We don't want any more um love canals, which was the American experience, of course.
00:47:31
Speaker
And the classic in Australia was the, I think the Armidale timber treatment site where a site with tar contamination was turned into a residential development without any consideration at all for the previous use and the fact there was still a lot of tar in the ground.
00:47:49
Speaker
The area of sustainability and and the actual analysis of sustainability for remediation, site remediation is is going to be an important one going forward. As I've said, the resources are limited, so we've got to make sure that we use them and to their best effect.
00:48:11
Speaker
And the background that we're working in is changing due to climate change so that you need to do more than just look at what's what the issue currently is and consider the long-term costs that long-term changes in climate could have on your remediation projects. The long-term costs, and I mentioned this before, include monitoring and management and treatment if you've got groundwater systems in the ground that are going to be there for a long time, be they passive or active.
00:48:41
Speaker
I had the experience of dealing with some forecasting of future costs and basically um converting them back into current-day cost, net present value sort of analysis, and discovered that significant future costs appeared to dwindle into insignificance when they were basically brought back to today's dollars.
00:49:05
Speaker
And when I did some reading on them on the subject, I found a reference that said, yes, that is the case. And for that reason, they can easily be forgotten or overlooked.
00:49:17
Speaker
But when we looked at the Sydney Olympic side of course exactly that had happened and it was now 20 years down the track and those future costs which had dwindled into insignificance when we looked at when net present value was used to evaluate them back in the design phase which was the mid 90s.
00:49:35
Speaker
They were significant costs today and no one was prepared for them because they'd forgotten about them because apparently the net present value method of analysis said that they wouldn't be significant costs in the future. And I think that's um it from me today. It's been a ah pleasure speaking to you and I hope you got something out of it.
00:49:56
Speaker
And um I'm always available to take a call and point someone in the right direction if I know where that is, if anyone would like to take the invitation up. I'm ah john.hunt at ventia.com. Thank you. Thank you so much for being my guest today, John. It's been a really interesting conversation. Thank you very much. That wraps up this episode of Contamination Station. Thanks for listening.
00:50:24
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.