Remediation Professionals: Earth Healing Specialists
An Article by Kate Hughes

The remediation industry is a broad church. Its public face is more often than not around the physicality of on-ground projects that clean up contaminated sites. Former tips, service stations, chemical and gas manufacturing, timber treatment plants, cattle tick dip sites, mines and other now defunct industries have all been subject to remediation, as have natural systems impacted by industrial activities including groundwater and sediments.

When remediation is underway, members of the public might see fences, floating barriers, barges, heavy equipment, people in hard hats and orange vests, as well as large trucks bringing in or taking out material, and smaller vans that belong to subcontractors who might be taking samples, checking equipment and the like. As time goes by, people might also see the results of all this activity, which could look like a new residential development, shopping centre or parklands, clean foreshores, or a healthier-looking waterway.

This then is the public face of the remediation industry, but it is much more than what the public sees. The industry is more than engineers, geologists and all the associated contractors who supply technical on-ground services. There are also professionals from computing and modelling sciences, sampling and analytical services including risk assessment, the legal and auditing sector, as well as from areas around urban planning, development, communications and social engagement. Given this, it could be that the official definition of remediation is in need of an update. The Commonwealth of Australia defines remediation as the clean-up or mitigation of pollution or of contamination of soil or water by various methods. It is a technical definition that neglects to include those professions that are essential to successful remediation but not associated directly with the various methods referred to in the Commonwealth’s definition which pertain to choices of remediation technologies. A more inclusive definition would recognise that the remediation industry is indeed a broad church, requiring a mix of expertise around site characterisation, hazard and risk assessment, project management, communications, technology performance, and validation processes. Remediation professionals work on remediation sites, and in offices where projects are conceived, designed, planned, mobilised, managed, communicated, monitored, and audited. It is truly an inter-disciplinary industry where people work together in one of the most important areas of human endeavour…..transforming an environmental liability into a social asset, helping to heal the earth.

Now is that too long a bow to draw, too big a claim? Not at all! For a start, credible reports from a wide range of scientific and policy organisations acknowledge that the planet is suffering under a heavy pollution load. In response to this, the remediation industry has grown from its early days in the 1980s to a mature dynamic industry whose task it is to reduce contamination in the environment, not add to it. Success involves a measurable reduction in public health or environmental risk due to the removal of pollution, as well as other social benefits around improved neighbourhood amenity and urban renewal. Remediation is a future oriented, team-based inter-disciplinary industry that can, on a good day, offer young and mid-career professionals scope to apply not only their formal knowledge to solve problems but their understanding and experience as well. Let’s explore this further

Accurate problem definition is the starting point of a good quality remediation project, no matter how modest or how daunting. Think about the clean-up that will be required in post-wartime Ukraine or the challenge of mining remediation in the Northern Territory where contaminated sites are remote, where sacred sites abound and it rains a lot! And then there is the ongoing challenge of sediment remediation in places like Papua New Guinea where whole river systems have been polluted by mining wastes. They seem like overwhelming problems with few practical solutions and the challenges posed by tight budgets. But hey! Situations like this have always existed so there is no reason to think things can’t improve even in the most challenging of circumstances. Imagine being one of the first analysts to tackle sediment characterisation in Australia. The late Ted Johnston was the man of the hour when in 1989, the NSW government engaged his company Johnstone Environmental Technology to assess the extent of contamination on the Union Carbide site on the Rhodes Peninsula and adjacent Homebush Bay. Ted took a series of sediment samples from these two sites in the late 1980s using sampling equipment that was, by today’s standards, very simple. To record his findings, he produced a series of hand-drawn maps.

Figure 1. Drawing of Union Carbide site and adjacent Homebush Bay with monitoring points indicated. Johnstone Environmental Technology (JET) 1989.

Figure 2. Map segment from hand drawn map of the Union Carbide site and adjacent Homebush Bay with dioxin monitoring points and results indicated.

Figure 3. Identifier for Johnstone Environmental Technology. 1989

This pioneering work, and that of others, including UK and US experts began the process of remediation on the Rhodes Peninsula and neighbouring Homebush Olympic site. These projects took many years to achieve their goals and in doing so, set new standards for land and sediment clean up. Plenty of ALGA members began their careers on these sites there and helped grow what is now a mature industry.

In the forty-plus years that have passed since Ted Johnstone began his monitoring project, sampling and measurement equipment has developed at an incredible pace and now there are highly sophisticated and accurate measurement technologies available, and more coming on stream all the time. These machines were all developed by people with not only technical skills but the imagination and confidence to apply them to create new things. Today, the latest technological wonder is artificial intelligence and no doubt people with the necessary skill and imagination will apply it to create better tools, some of them no doubt, to provide new tools for use by the remediation industry.

The scope to apply new thinking to solve established problems is something worthy of attention by young and mid-career professionals in the remediation industry. The amazing new detection technologies are making data around site characterisation more accurate than anyone could imagine 30+ years ago but working out what to do with the data and how to manage the inherent uncertainties of remediation requires imagination and curiosity as well as core scientific skills. Plenty of opportunities for those who want to make a difference and help heal the earth.

Article Published on 26/02/2024

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