Navigating 25 years of environmental change requires agility. Enviropacific delivers integrated remediation, water, and resource recovery outcomes.
The moment a new contaminant is identified, or a new piece of legislation comes into effect, the goalposts shift, sending ripples through the Australian industrial landscape.
In the remediation and resource recovery sector, where compliance and environmental outcomes are non-negotiable, the ability to adapt is a necessity.
Few companies have demonstrated such agility over a quarter-century, but Enviropacific, currently celebrating its 25th anniversary, is one of them.
The story of Enviropacific is one of constant change, born from the truth that where there is contaminated ground, there is almost always contaminated water, and where there is waste, there must be recovery.
Founded on core principles of innovation and client focus, the company has successfully grown from a specialised remediation outfit to a national entity employing nearly 300 people.
The expansion into water and resource recovery was an organic response to the complexity of the problems the company was hired to solve.
Fred Lunsmann, General Manager of the Remediation division, has been with the company for 21 of those 25 years. He describes the industry’s evolution as relentless.
“The regulations are always tightening, and the benchmark for industry best practice is always increasing,” Fred says. “Once there’s an improved established way of doing things, that’s the new benchmark.”
He says the increasing standards, combined with rising community expectations and the sudden emergence of contaminants such as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), has defined the past two decades.
The Remediation division, which performs the physical removal and treatment of contaminated soil, operates on two very different scales. While the major projects often grab the headlines, they only represent about half of the total workload.
“We’ve got a lot of smaller, reactive projects around the country,” Fred says. “We might be on site for a week doing asbestos cleanup or cleaning up a service station site or a small demolition project.
“We do over 300 of these smaller projects a year, compared to maybe 10 or 15 of the bigger more complex ones.”
He says the ability to be agile and responsive to those smaller, high-volume reactive jobs is what allows the division to maintain a national footprint and a sustainable operational base.
Complex projects, like the works carried out to turn a historic industrial area in Barangaroo, New South Wales into a sustainable mixed-use precinct, or the ongoing remediation of former gas work sites, builds capability in the team. But Fred says it is the high-volume, rapid-response work that demonstrates the company’s flexibility.
He says Enviropacific’s founding purpose remains clear: “We want to provide innovative and cost-effective solutions to our clients to solve their environmental problems.”
Water outcome guarantee
The Water division is an example of Enviropacific’s organic evolution. As the Remediation team dealt with contaminated soil, it encountered contaminated groundwater, which required management and treatment to support the overall cleanup.
This led to the internal growth of a technical team that eventually spun out into its own national division.
John Saleh, General Manager of the Water division, has a background in chemical and process engineering, making him well-suited to the complex analytical challenges the industry faces today.
He points out that the water sector is defined by the contaminant of the day: PFAS.
“PFAS contamination and pollution of our waterways is a growing issue, and something that Enviropacific has good skillsets in, as well as a strong history of successful remediation,” John says.
“Our business is well placed to deal with the PFAS challenge as it becomes more and more prevalent in our environment.”
The division’s work, which includes treating complex legacy contamination for clients such as the Department of Defence, airports, and mines, relies on commercially available adsorption techniques, predominantly using granular activated carbon (GAC) and ion exchange resins.
What sets the division apart, however, is the guarantee of outcome it offers. John says the team will guarantee to treat water to a specific volume and a specific quality.
“A lot of people won’t guarantee an outcome. They’ll just say, ‘we’ve got a technology, it’ll do its best,’ but we take that extra step,” he says.
“When you step back and you look at the impacts PFAS can have for a community, it’s really quite incredible. If we can remove PFAS from the groundwater, it can be the difference between a farmer continuing to run a property that’s been in their family for generations, and that farmland no longer being productively used.”
Resource, not waste
The company’s third essential pillar, Resource Recovery, completes Enviropacific’s circular approach to environmental management.
Remediation and water divisions generate materials – soils, sediments, and sludges – that must be handled responsibly. The Resource Recovery division, led by Dino Adikaram, works to process these streams, diverting as much as possible from landfill.
“We don’t see waste. We see resource,” Dino says.
“When we receive contaminated soil or sludge from a remediation site, the easiest path for the project is disposal, but that conflicts with Enviropacific’s fundamental environmental values. Our recovery facilities are engineered to separate, treat, and blend these materials back into usable formats that meet strict environmental criteria for reuse in construction and civil fill.
“Every stream is an opportunity to avoid landfill. That makes complex clean-up projects economically viable and environmentally defensible.”
This ensures that the work of the remediation and water teams doesn’t just displace the environmental problem; it converts it into a valuable input for the next stage of infrastructure development.
The integration of each division is key to Enviropacific’s longevity. From the initial complex site remediation to the treatment of contaminated groundwater and the final recovery of reusable materials, the three divisions operate as a vertically integrated ecosystem.
Fred says this approach allows the company to maintain quality control and innovative capacity across the entire project lifecycle, managing the regulatory pressures and community scrutiny. It also ensures that the environmental outcomes are holistic, not compartmentalised.
He says the waste and resource recovery sector requires more than just capability; it requires a deep, almost instinctual connection to the problem at hand.
“I still really enjoy what I do, and it’s because of that mix of project delivery, often with a technical solution involved,” Fred says. “A lot of our employees really relate to the environmental outcomes, and it keeps them focused and engaged and interested in the work they do. They get a lot of satisfaction out of the work Enviropacific does.”
For more information, visit: www.enviropacific.com.au
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