WELCOME FROM OUR CEO

The CleanUp 2024 conference in Adelaide will provide a high-profile platform to strengthen existing relationships and introduce businesses and services to hundreds of stakeholders from across the region.

Site contamination and remediation professionals have a critical role to play in preventing serious harm to human health and the environment, and CleanUp 2024 will showcase world-class work on the remediation of existing and emerging contaminants.

It will also take place at a critical juncture.

Concerns about PFAS chemicals continue to grow, with regulators in many parts of the world proposing tighter restrictions or bans, and PFAS-related class action proceedings occurring in the US and Australia.

The success of our efforts to assess, prevent, and remediate all types of contamination is also playing an increasingly important role in ensuring the success of the shift to a net-zero, nature-positive, and circular economy.

For example, we are gradually shifting towards circular economy paradigm, but we must do so in a way that doesn't result in new complex contaminants that have negative economic repercussions. In particular, we need to ensure our use of waste-derived and recycled-content materials doesn't result in contamination from asbestos, PFAS, or other chemicals.

Sometimes, the task of dealing with contamination will provide opportunities for win-win sustainability benefits, and we must be constantly on the look-out for these.

Potential opportunities include converting biosolids to biochar, which could provide a nutrient-rich fertiliser in which carbon is permanently locked up, and any PFAS contaminants are destroyed. 

The essential, rapid shift to clean power will also present new challenges, as we develop ways to efficiently and effectively remediate large coal-fired power station sites, and prepare them for new productive uses, including clean renewable energy generation.

In addition, the increasing number of climate change-related natural disasters, such as severe flooding, creates new contamination dangers that must be assessed and managed.

Our capacity to restore nature – at long-last recognised as a task of great urgency – will also frequently depend on our success in remediating contaminated land.  

In addition, advances in big data and artificial intelligence are poised to transform aspects of our work.

Underlying all these developments, is the constant need to engage fully and respectfully with local communities, from the assessment process, during decision-making on clean-up methods, and through to post-clean-up monitoring.

The urgency of these various challenges makes it especially important to ensure policy-making and regulatory action on pollution at the local, national and global level is science-based, and this will be a key theme of the conference.

The presence of academic researchers (including PhD students), environmental consultants, regulators, government personnel and industry leaders at CleanUp 2024 will ensure the the latest scientific findings on assessment and remediation are widely disseminated.