How asbestos is finding its way into Melbourne’s parks

It started with a local dad finding a piece of suspicious compound material under a tree in a Spotswood park over Easter, amid bits of insulated wires, chunks of brick and concrete, plywood of various kinds and bits of wood with nails in it.

Almost two weeks on, teams of asbestos hygienists, council inspectors and the Environment Protection Authority have trawled city parks and found at least eight parks where bonded asbestos pieces have been found in mulch or in parklands, and a further four where items suspected to contain asbestos have been taken for testing.

Inspectors rake through and remove asbestos mulch at Donald McLean Reserve in Spotswood on Friday.Credit: Joe Armao

So, how would asbestos get into mulch?

Many people – unless you work in the waste, landscaping or gardening industry – may be under the impression that woodchip mulch just comes from trees or branches sent through a chipper. According to the EPA, there are hundreds of mulch producers in the state, most dealing only with these “virgin materials”.

But there are some huge operators who produce “recycled mulch”, which is also used in public spaces – sold to both local governments and direct to the public – made from wood pallets, fencing materials and timber from demolition sites.

Earlier this year 75 sites in NSW, including seven schools, a supermarket, hospitals and numerous public parks, were found to contain asbestos in recycled mulch.

The compound material found by a local dad in Donald McLean Reserve that kicked off a park blitz around Melbourne.Credit: Jason Murphy

Recycled mulch is a product that has been around for decades and is facilitated by regulators as a measure to divert massive amounts of reusable resources from landfill, according to Jeff Angel, director of the long-standing environmental group Total Environment Centre.

Rules set by regulators in Australia have no tolerance for harmful contaminants such as asbestos, but they accept that there will always be contamination of some kind in mulch and allows for contamination of glass, metal and plastics of 500 grams per tonne.

“It’s not a zero-contamination exercise,” says Angel, adding there is a long-running trade-off between the environmental benefits of recycling materials and the contamination that recycled mulch can introduce to open spaces.

“In order to have those standards met consistently, you need an effective regulatory inspection and compliance regime,” he said. “The question then becomes if that regime is insufficient, or lax, then this contaminated material is going to get into the environment.”

How is recycled wood mulch made?

Russell Norton runs The Mulch Centre just outside Geelong, which grinds up recycled wood on-site delivered by demolition companies for resale as mulch.

There are three main uses for Norton’s product: in the dairy and poultry farms as ground cover, to cover landfill and in public reserves around tree planting projects, which require mulch for water retention.

While he sells mulch to local councils – including Hobsons Bay where the bulk of asbestos discoveries have been identified – he says he is not caught up in the recent investigations, and invites his customers to come and see how his recycled mulch is made.

“I don’t want to be sending mulch out and people spread it under their plants, and then they ring me up saying ‘I’ve got shards of glass in it’. It’s not what we want to do,” he said.

Russell Norton, managing director of the Mulch Centre in Geelong.Credit: Joe Armao

He says consumers don’t need to be scared of mulch, and he was motivated to speak out on behalf of stringent operators to reassure the public. Last year he began charging demolition firms $500 if their loads were contaminated, which has led to a major increase in the quality of the waste dropped off.

“We don’t take painted material, we don’t take treated material,” he said. There are magnets in his machines that pull out metals and, in 17 years of operation, Norton said he’d never received a load containing asbestos. But he says a small amount of contamination is inevitable and allowed for within guidelines.

“I could tell you I will get every single bit of contamination and plastic and everything out of your mulch. But I’ll tell you now you won’t be paying $15 a metre,” he said. “There’s got to be some commercial reality around it.”

Hobsons Bay council has assured that the problems in its parks were in the recycled mulch areas under trees and by riverbanks, rather than the spongy pine mulch laid directly under children’s playgrounds.

Rubbish pulled out of delivered construction waste before it goes through a grinder at The Mulch Centre near Geelong.Credit: Joe Armao

Norton said there was a far more stringent standard for “soft fall” mulch than the recycled mulch he made, which meant the former was as expensive as $85 a metre, while recycled mulch was $15 a metre.

Some major commercial operators advertise that their soft fall mulch is made from 100 per cent virgin plantation pine, but Norton said not all soft fall sold everywhere is 100 per cent virgin.

“It can be both [recycled and virgin],” he said. “But you can’t have a supplier of the soft fall just say ‘we meet the Australian standard’. There needs to be some third-party proof.”

The Environmental Protection Agency director of regulatory services, Duncan Pendrigh, told ABC Radio Melbourne this week that it was the responsibility of demolition firms to ensure asbestos was removed from a site by a licensed asbestos removalist, and that any other waste didn’t have any asbestos before it was taken to a recycling facility.

“So timbers coming to mulch producers should be free of asbestos. If they’re not, if there’s a small level of contamination, the mulch producer is then required to visibly inspect all loads and remove any contaminants with that material,” he said.

The watchdog has this week cleared two key unnamed suppliers of mulch for the contaminated parks in Hobsons Bay after visiting them in the past fortnight and testing their current supplies of mulch.

But it has also said some problematic mulch in the municipality was laid up to nine years ago, before the introduction of the Environment Protection Act 2017 and the regulation of commercial mulch producers.

The EPA has also said it believed pieces of asbestos at a number of parks had likely arrived there by dumping after the mulch was laid, or was present in the ground before the mulch was laid and had risen to the surface. On Friday, it said “half a shopping bag” full of pieces had been found.

A waste and recycling industry source, who declined to be identified criticising the regulator, said asbestos contamination and dumping “doesn’t happen that way” [the EPA described].

“Asbestos gets dumped in loads in out-of-the-way places, not by guys driving around in trucks at night shovelling into public gardens and spreading it around. Friable asbestos and broken asbestos sheeting is very dangerous to handle, you’re hardly going to take those kinds of risks.”

The EPA’s Pendrigh also revealed on radio this week that of 59 mulch suppliers it surprise-tested during March after the NSW crisis, six had asbestos in their waste piles before them going through the grinders and were issued statutory notices to make improvements. All 59 suppliers mulch samples were clear of asbestos.

Are there any alternatives?

The Australian Services Union, which represents council workers and contractors, said many regional councils were likely to be caught up in mulch contamination issues as they processed their own mulch.

The union’s secretary Lisa Darmanin said these workers knew what was coming into recycling centres and where it would be used, unlike commercial contracts.

“Using employees who live in the area and understand what’s at stake will always mean better
outcomes for communities,” she said.

Jeff Angel said the only foolproof way of avoiding contamination in mulch would be to use only vegetation matter, not wood that had already been used.

But Russell Norton says this is unrealistic commercially, and would instead result in forests used for the widely needed mulch products.

He said it would drive up the price of timber for houses and construction, adding that mulch made from freshly cut down vegetation had other downsides; pest species and fungal or root diseases can be spread via mulch causing other environmental problems.

What’s the overall risk?

The Victorian EPA has stressed that all asbestos found in the last fortnight is bonded – the microscopic, cancerous fibres firmly stuck in cement sheeting – and the chance of it getting into a park user’s lungs is “almost negligible”.

“We don’t have a problem that is of any substantial risk to the community in our parks and reserves,” Pendrigh said on Friday.

But Peter Tighe, chair of the Asbestos Diseases Research Foundation Board and former CEO of the Australian government’s Asbestos Safety and Eradication Agency, said he believed the pieces being found were “low risk, not no risk”.

Tighe was doubtful of the theories around dumping – or it being present before mulch was laid.

“That material goes through a shredder … obviously that’s why they’re finding small pieces,” said Tighe, who is not involved in the active investigations.

The EPA says some pieces of asbestos found in mulch were larger than the pieces of the mulch, indicating it wasn’t likely it had gone through the grinder.

“I always worry when people say ‘oh, it’s just mulch with bonded asbestos, it’s low risk’,” said Tighe.

“So whilst you might only see a small, broken asbestos, that’s not to say that there aren’t asbestos fibres that have been mulched up and chopped up and is actually in the mulch itself. Asbestos fibres are a tenth of the size of a human hair, the only way you can [see them] is to put it under a polarising light microscope.”

According to NSW Health, the risk of developing diseases rises with the amount of fibre breathed in from asbestos exposure. Those who experience health problems from asbestos inhalation usually have had prolonged exposure to high levels of asbestos. Symptoms of these diseases typically don’t manifest until 20 to 30 years after initial asbestos exposure.

How is this being handled?

The EPA insists it is resourced enough to handle investigations and regulatory work, and the government has dismissed calls from Hobsons Bay council and the opposition to set up a taskforce following the lead of NSW.

It said it carried out up to 1000 inspections, most unannounced, of permissioned waste and resource recovery facilities in Victoria.

It says that since laws that came into effect on July 1, 2021, mulch producers that deal in industrial waste are now required to obtain permission from the EPA to operate, and to comply with strict requirements to prevent harm to human health and the environment. These also apply to demolition contractors.

“Non-compliance with these laws can attract fines of up to $4 million and five years in prison for serious offences,” a spokesman said.

With Chris Vedelago

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