For Canberra homeowners
Canberra has a longer memory of this than most cities, and the rules here are stricter than the rest of the country. This page is what we’d tell you on the phone.
In the ACT you cannot remove asbestos yourself, at any size. Most of the country allows a homeowner to take out up to ten square metres of non-friable asbestos without a licence. The ACT removed that exception. Here, removal work goes to a licensed removalist, full stop. If you have read a national guide or a Bunnings article that says otherwise, it is not wrong, it is just not about here.
Assume there is asbestos in it until someone qualified says otherwise. That is the working assumption the regulator uses, and it is why an ACT Asbestos Advice Notice is attached to the sale and lease of every home built in or before 1990. You have probably already been handed one and filed it.
Where it usually turns up in a Canberra house: eaves and soffits, the wall sheet behind a bathroom or laundry, fibro fences, the shed, vinyl floor tiles and the paper backing under them, and the flue or the meter board.
Between the late 1960s and 1978 a Canberra business pumped raw asbestos fibre into the ceilings of houses across the city as insulation. A Commonwealth clean-up in the 1980s missed some of it. The ACT Government eventually bought and demolished more than a thousand affected houses, and a register of affected properties is still maintained.
This matters for one practical reason: loose-fill is friable asbestos, which is a different and more dangerous class of material to the sheet in your bathroom wall. It requires a Class A licensed removalist. We hold Class B, so it is not our work. If you lift a manhole cover and see loose grey fibre, don’t touch it, don’t go back up there, and ring us and we’ll tell you who to call.
Nobody can identify asbestos by eye, including us. A sample goes to a lab, or an independent licensed assessor comes out and surveys the place. That is a separate trade from removal, deliberately, so the person telling you it’s there isn’t the person selling you the removal.
It depends on the material, the quantity and the access, and any tradesperson who gives you a number without seeing a photo is guessing. Tony, worth putting honest ranges here. Two of your competitors already publish numbers, so buyers are anchoring on theirs before they get to you.
To a licensed facility, wrapped and booked in. In the ACT that is a booked drop at Mugga Lane arranged through the operator. It cannot go in a skip, a trailer-load to the tip, or your green bin.
An independent licensed assessor inspects and issues a clearance certificate. Keep it. It is the document that tells the next buyer, the next builder and your insurer that the work was done by someone licensed and checked by someone independent.