Vegesafe
Participate
Christmas + Summer Holidays: VegeSafe will be pulling up stumps over the December and January months, and will be back in action in Feburary, 2018. This is our first break in operations since starting way back in 2013. We hope everyone has a wonderful holiday period and a happy new year!
The VegeSafe program began in September of 2013 at Macquarie University’s Open Day event, where we offered free soil metal testing to attendees. Since then our program had offered free soil metal testing. However, in order to keep the program operational, a small fee of $20 is required for the time and costs associated with soil metal analysis and laboratory consumables. If you have a vegetable patch or are concerned of metal contamination in your backyard, we encourage you to participate. Follow these three easy steps:
Step 1: Complete the necessary VegeSafe Consent form.
Step 2: Collect your soil samples by following our Soil Sampling Instructions.
Step 3: Together with the completed Consent form, send in your soil samples to:
VegeSafe
Professor Mark Taylor
Department of Environmental Sciences
Faculty of Science and Engineering
E7A.433
Macquarie University
NSW 2109 Australia
Things to consider before sending samples to VegeSafe
Soil sample size: An ideal sample size (per sample) would be between a golf ball and a cricket ball, and would fit inside a small ziplock bag (see below: $20 note for scale). If you have small ziplock sandwich bags, then the sample should take half of the bags space.
Turnaround time: We strive to provide a fast turnaround time (3-5 weeks) for our participants. However, we can often be busy with other academic duties at Macquarie University such as teaching, research, experiments, field visits and conferences. We aim to return your soil metal testing results within one month of recieving your samples, yet there may be instances where we recieve many samples at once, and results may be slightly delayed.
$20 Fee: this $20 fee covers up to five samples submitted, it is not $20 per sample. Soil samples can be sent with a $20 note, or a $20 payment can be made to support our program via the following link: