Rachel Carbonell reported this story on Monday, September 16, 2013 12:40:00

ELEANOR HALL: Australia has more than 150,000 sites that are potentially contaminated with toxic waste and experts say that only a tiny fraction of them are being cleaned up to remove the risk to human health.



The Director of the Research Centre for Contamination Assessment and Remediation, Professor Ravi Naidu, told Rachel Carbonell that most of the sites are in urban areas and pose a serious threat to human and environmental health.



RAVI NAIDU: What we do know is that Australia has 160,000 potentially contaminated sites, and so far we have remediated less than 1 per cent of these contaminated sites. Whereas globally we are looking at in excess of three million potentially contaminated sites, and already, we are spending in excess of $100 billion per annum assessing, managing and/or cleaning up these sites.



But the key here is that these contaminants are not being remediated at the pace that we should. And as a consequence, it is already impacting many, many people from health perspective, and we only recognise that when they die of cancer.



RACHEL CARBONELL: When you say "contaminated sites", what kinds of things are you talking about?



RAVI NAIDU: Here we are looking at contaminants in the air. So inside the house, for example they may be subjected to certain toxic organic substances. There are historically contaminated sites where we might have solvents, like chlorinated hydrocarbons or petroleum hydrocarbons.



There's metal contaminants - lead is an example. There are many sites where we have lead in the soil and fine dust particles that people can inhale. And there's also asbestos, which is a major issue.



RACHEL CARBONELL: If 1 per cent of these sites are being adequately dealt with, you're saying that 99 per cent of the 160,000 potentially contaminated sites in Australia are still posing a health risk to people and the environment?



RAVI NAIDU: That's right. Because somewhere between 60 to 80 per cent of these sites are in the urban environment, and somewhere between 20 to 40 per cent are in the outback.



It's not just the legacy site we are looking at, vut also we are introducing many different new chemicals in the environment because these are manufactured annually and they're released into the environment without us giving a thorough consideration to the (inaudible) these contaminants have and the risk it poses to the human environment.



We may work on a small percentage of these but a large per cent goes in without us conducting the detailed study that provides us with information that we need to ensure that we protect our environment.



RACHEL CARBONELL: You say that it's already known that these contaminants and contaminated sites are affecting human health. How do we know that? What do we know about that?



RAVI NAIDU: What we know about that? Let's look for example arsenic. Tens of thousands of people have died of arsenic poisoning. Let's look at mercury as an example, the poisoning in Japan. Let's look at asbestos for example. We have had many incidences of asbestos poisoning here in Australia.



The other examples are hexavalent chromium poisoning in other countries. And all of these chemicals, toxic substances, are present at contaminated sites that we have to deal with here as well.



RACHEL CARBONELL: Asbestos has been a big issue in Australia. But how much of a problem have other toxic issues been for Australian human health?



RAVI NAIDU: Other toxic substances that we commonly find here in Australia are polyaromatic hydrocarbons and petroleum hydrocarbons. There are many, many contaminated sites which have these chemicals.



RACHEL CARBONELL: So what do you think needs to be done?



RAVI NAIDU: What I believe needs to be done is firstly, on the one hand we need to support our policy makers such that the policy makers are able to come up with policies which are underpinned by good science.



Second, we need to bring together these policy makers and scientists so that they can accelerate the pace with which we come up with management and remediation strategies which is not done as well as could have been done.



We have accelerated the pace, but we need to do a lot more than what we have been able to do.



ELEANOR HALL: That's Professor Ravi Naidu from the Centre for Contamination Assessment and Remediation. He was speaking to Rachel Carbonell.