The warehouse in Melbourne’s outer north was supposed to be filled with scrap metal and broken glass, overflow storage for a nearby recycling business.
It wasn’t until the company collapsed into insolvency six months later, that the warehouse doors were opened to reveal a potential health and environmental disaster on Melbourne’s suburban fringe: pallets of steel drums and plastic tubs, stacked to the ceiling, filled with mercury, contaminated powders, leaking batteries, and suspected X-ray machine parts. Almost 800 containers of highly toxic material, abandoned by a company that no longer operated.