An asbestos-contaminated park in Sydney’s inner west will remain closed for at least six weeks while all of the recycled mulch on the site is removed and replaced following an order from the New South Wales environmental watchdog.
The Environment Protection Authority has issued a clean-up notice to the state’s department of transport, which was in charge of delivering the Rozelle parklands as part of the government’s $3.9bn Rozelle interchange project.
It opened to the public less than two months ago and was forced to close last week after asbestos was found by a child in garden mulch beside a playground.
The EPA ordered the department to remove all recycled mulch from the park by the end of February.
“Transport for NSW will progressively remove the mulch over the coming weeks and provide evidence to the EPA that it has been disposed of lawfully,” a NSW EPA spokesperson told Guardian Australia.
“The EPA’s investigation into the source of the asbestos is continuing.”
The remediation efforts will see the park closed for the rest of January and February. The works will leave residents without the freshly opened green space for the remainder of the school holidays.
Bonded asbestos has been found in 14 locations in and around the park in mulch provided by Greenlife Resource Recovery.
The transport department secretary, Josh Murray, said last Thursday the park would be closed “at least” until this week while the government came up with a remediation plan.
“The entire park will remain closed until we have sign-off from independent experts that tell us that effective remediation of areas has been completed,” he said. “If a staged reopening is possible, obviously we’d like to do that.”
Earlier this week, Transport for NSW said “targeted testing” of the parklands and “associated sites” had “now been completed by independent contamination and remediation experts”, with one of seven outstanding tests returning a positive result for bonded asbestos.
The site that returned the positive test was a garden bed “adjacent to the road and active transport path near the junction of the Anzac Bridge and Victoria Road”.
The department analysed 92 samples from the park and surrounding sites related to the $3.9bn Rozelle interchange project in the inner west, after a child brought home mulch containing bonded asbestos last week.
Bonded asbestos is considered lower risk than friable asbestos because it is mixed with a hard material such as concrete and therefore the hazardous particles are less likely to become airborne.
Guardian Australia has confirmed Greenlife Resource Recovery supplied the recycled garden mulch in question. The source of the contamination is still being investigated and Guardian Australia is not suggesting Greenlife was responsible for it.
Greenlife co-director Domenic Vitocco on Monday said the company had “recently responded cooperatively to inquiries from the EPA”.
“Greenlife takes its manufacturing of products very seriously and follows a strict range of protocols that it has established with various professionals and agencies,” he said.
