NSW Excavated Natural Material standards and guidelines are passed by the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA), and it provides the requirements that should be observed by suppliers of excavated natural materials regarding uses such as application in earthworks or engineering fills. Under regulations, excavated natural material refers to naturally occurring soil and rocks excavated from the ground and has at least 98% of natural material by weight. The standards and regulations apply to all suppliers of excavated raw materials.
Chemical and other material requirements forbid the supply of materials exceeding the defined absolute maximum concentration or the maximum average concentration. Sampling requirements require suppliers to prepare sampling plans and perform sampling and testing of the materials. It also includes characterization sampling of chemicals, segregation and exclusion of hotspots, the subdivision of sites exceeding 50,000m2, and proper storage of excavated natural material. Chemicals covered include mercury, copper, cadmium, zinc, arsenic, lead, toluene, and ethyl-benzene.
Consequently, the standards require testing of excavated natural materials conducted by analytical laboratories approved by the National Association of Testing Authorities (NATA). It must also utilize test methods specified in the standards and guidelines, for instance, the USEPA SW-846 method. Additionally, the guidelines require that suppliers provide notifications to those they intend to supply. Suppliers are also required to comply with record-keeping and reporting requirements. Information passed includes a written statement of compliance and copies of excavated natural material exemption and order.
The NSW Excavated Natural Materials standards and guidelines aim to reduce the risk of potential harm to human health, the environment, and agriculture. The suppliers must ensure that the application of these guidelines complies with other legislative requirements; hence they complement one another.
On the ESdat website, NSW Excavated Natural Material 2014
All compiled environmental guidelines and standards are shown on the ESdat website. These are pre-loaded into ESdat Online.
ESdat is a single repository for storing, analyzing and reporting your environmental investigation and monitoring data. ESdat validates and imports data from laboratories, data loggers, field apps and spreadsheets. Users can filter and view data using the built-in graphing, mapping, tabulation, statistical and report generation tools. Increasing efficiency and confidence in the data are often cited as key benefits by organizations using ESdat.
ESdat Online delivers a highly cost-effective and efficient approach to store your ongoing monitoring environmental data, optionally with a historical data upload provided as a getting started service. ESdat Online is perfect if you want a cloud-based system that collates and reports your ongoing laboratory and field results.
ESdat Server provides the advantages of ESdat Online with the option of adding ESdat Desktop for data experts to upload their historical data, effectively interrogate the raw data being used within the database, and automatically launch and send data to other Desktop Applications such as Surfer, ArcGIS and Excel.
A variety of complementary products are also available to help with related work, such as sample planning and electronic Chain of Custody (LSPECS), offline field data collection or bore logging (pLog), production of bore logs (ESlog), public portals and customized reporting.
Reference
NSW EPA (2014). Resource Recovery Order under Part 9, Clause 93 of the Protection of the Environment Operations (Waste) Regulation 2014. Retrieved from https://www.epa.nsw.gov.au/-/media/epa/corporate-site/resources/waste/rro14-excavated-natural-material.pdf
