Remediation

Sydney's rapid expansion in the 1950s and 1960s and the start of the ‘throw-away’ society meant people and industry needed more space to dispose of their waste. Illegal dumping around Homebush Bay created ugly tips and polluted waterways. Community concerns about the environmental damage caused by such practices, combined with changing land use patterns in the area, eventually resulted in changes to human interaction with the environment of Homebush Bay and later, Sydney Olympic Park.

The remediation process at Homebush Bay leading up to the 2000 Olympic Games was the largest ever attempted in Australia. The primary emphasis of the remediation strategy was the treatment of contaminated landfill material on-site (to avoid transferring any material elsewhere) and the safe containment of treated or untreated material. Another part of this remediation process was to reconstruct habitats representative of those that had existed 200 years before.

Consider