Sand cleanup costs revealed

As the South Australian education sector undertakes the biggest cleanup in its history, the enormous cost can now be revealed. Who will pay is now top of mind.

With more than 500 South Australian public schools and preschools and hundreds of non-government sites affected by the recall of children’s play sand due to the potential of asbestos contamination, the cost of the cleanup has now estimated to exceed $1.5 million dollars.

Under SafeWork SA advice, the cleanup of the recalled sand needs to be undertaken by licensed cleaning services while air monitoring takes place. Sites where the sand was loose also requires lab-certified testing to be completed before students and staff can return to classrooms.

Imported children’s play sand was recalled from Australian retailers last week including Officeworks, Target and Kmart, due to its potential contamination with naturally occurring asbestos. The Minister for Education is today calling on those companies to help fund the cleanup.

Health advice shows the risk is low, but precautionary measures have been taken based on advice from regulators to remove it from schools, preschools and childcare centers right across the country, as well as many homes around Australia.

The department also alerted the non-government school sector about the recall and the Education Standards Board communicated to all childcare providers.

Quotes

Attributable to Blair Boyer

South Australia is stepping up to quickly and safely remove this sand from schools, but the simple point is this: the cleanup bill is enormous, and the money will come from education budgets to pay for it.

This is the biggest decontamination effort South Australian schools have ever undertaken.

The specialised removal, cleaning and waste handling required comes with a massive price tag, and those costs are already piling up.

The public deserve to know how a banned product was allowed into Australia in the first place and who is going to pay for the consequences. States shouldn’t be left alone to carry the burden for a failure of regulation federally and of product testing by multi-billion dollar companies.

I have already written to the Federal Government calling for an urgent national inquiry into how asbestos-containing children’s sand products were allowed into Australia and distributed so widely.

Today, I’m calling on the retailers to help fund the cleanup.