Asbestos Near Me Archive · program complete

Origin story

It started as a joke.

What began as satirical commentary during Mardi Gras in March 2024 became a practical, public-facing tracker for asbestos mulch investigations across NSW, and later Victoria and Queensland.

From satire to public service

The project started as a joke aimed at the unfolding NSW asbestos mulch crisis, then quickly evolved into a central reference point for affected communities. As updates expanded across jurisdictions, the site became a consistent record of site status, timeline progress and remediation outcomes.

In 2024 it tracked active investigations. By February 2025, with every identified site investigated and remediated where required, it became a long-term record of what happened and how it was resolved.

The original satirical page is still part of the archive. See the first version.

Timeline

  1. Launched A rapidly built tracker inspired by social commentary.
  2. Grew into a proper tracker More data, status tracking, filtering and sorting for active incidents.
  3. Went interstate Coverage expanded from NSW to sites in Victoria and Queensland.
  4. Became an archive Remediation finished across all tracked states.

Where it started

The first public posts that kicked everything off.

About the data

Site details came from public notices by the NSW EPA, City of Sydney, Transport for NSW, EPA Victoria, WorkSafe Queensland and local councils. The dates on each site are the dates this tracker recorded a change, recovered from its update history, so they can trail official announcements by a day or two.

The full dataset is free to reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence: download the CSV or JSON and credit “Asbestos Near Me”. Coordinates are approximate, and this is an independent archive rather than an official record.