At Adelaide's CleanUp 09 conference, Niall Johnston of the NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water has discussed the importance of redeveloping "brownfield" areas as part of sustainable urban development.
Johnston believes that redeveloping areas like the Melbourne Docklands and Sydney's Homebush Bay and Rhodes Peninsular is a cornerstone of sustainable urban development which makes best use of transport, utilities and other infrastructure.
"It's not just about recycling land," he says. "It's also about developing our cities in the most sustainable way, as regards their use of energy, resources and infrastructure."
Australia has between 10,000 and 160,000 potentially contaminated industrial sites which Johnston believes now need to be cleaned up and redeveloped.
"Australia is fortunate in having a mature remediation industry supported by a robust, structured framework for the assessment of site contamination via the National Environmental Protection Measure 1999."
What now needs to be done is to ensure that the community is comfortable with the idea of living on a previously contaminated site through community consultation, he says.
Brownfields tend to be concentrated in areas long associated with heavy industry such as petrochemical refining, chemical manufacture, application and manufacture of pesticides, coal gasification, mineral processing, and ordinance manufacture as well more unusual activities such as radium refining.
