Managing contaminated land
Reconfiguring land
If you are the owner of a parcel of land which is listed on the Environmental Management Register (EMR) or the Contaminated Land Register (CLR), and you wish to reconfigure the lot, you need to be aware of the nature and extent of contamination present and any risks it may pose to human health or the environment. If you subdivide the lot and take no action to investigate or deal with any contamination issues, the lot remains on the EMR or CLR and any new lot is also automatically listed. You must then give notice to any potential buyers that the land is listed on the EMR or CLR.
If you do not want the land and/or the new lots to stay listed on the EMR or CLR, you will need to engage a suitably qualified person to conduct a site investigation. The site investigation process will confirm whether the site is contaminated and if so whether the contamination needs to be remediated, the contaminated portion excised appropriately during the design of the reconfiguration and/or managed under the conditions of a site management plan. Where new land parcels are deemed to be not contaminated land and suitable for any use the registered survey plan for the land must be submitted along with the auditor-certified contaminated land investigation document to enable the land to be removed from the land registers.
In this guide:
- General environmental duty
- Duty to notify
- Duty to restore
- Removals and changes to land registers
- Reconfiguring land
- Buying and selling contaminated land