Asbestos-cement fencing is one of the most common finds on older Sydney blocks, and one of the most frequently damaged. It sits at ground level where mowers, cars, trailers and tree roots reach it, and unlike a roof, nobody ever inspects it.
How to recognise it
Asbestos-cement fence sheeting is usually grey, roughly 1.8 m high, fixed between steel or timber posts, with a hard, slightly fibrous edge where it has been cut. Older sheets often have a faint woven or “super six” corrugated profile. Colorbond, treated pine and modern fibre-cement look different but not obviously so from across a yard — the identification guide has the visual cues, and only a laboratory test confirms it.
The condition that matters is the edges and the bottom rail. Chalky, crumbling or impact-cracked sheeting is shedding, and a fence that has been hit by a car or a falling branch is the version that needs attention now rather than at some point.
The buried offcuts nobody mentions
Whoever built the fence cut the sheets to length on site, and in the era these fences were built the offcuts routinely went into the trench with the posts or were buried in the fence line.
That means the visible fence is often not the whole job. Digging out posts turns up fragments, and if the fragments are extensive the job stops being a fence removal and becomes a contaminated soil job. We check the fence line as part of the work rather than leaving you to find it when you plant something.
This is also why fence quotes should be honest about what happens if fragments appear. Ask.
The neighbour conversation
A boundary fence is a shared asset, and in NSW the Dividing Fences Act 1991 provides for the cost of replacing a dividing fence to be shared between the adjoining owners, usually on the basis of a “sufficient dividing fence”. We are not lawyers and we do not give legal advice on your boundary — but two practical things are worth knowing before you book anything:
- Agree it in writing first. A replacement fence booked without the neighbour’s agreement is a dispute waiting to happen, and asbestos removal is not a job you want to stop halfway.
- Get one quote covering removal and the new fence. It is easier to split a single number, and it avoids the situation where the asbestos comes out and the replacement is still being argued about.
If your neighbour wants their own quote for comparison, the cost guide sets out the published Sydney ranges so both sides are reading from the same numbers.
How the removal runs
Sheets are unfixed and lifted whole rather than snapped — a whole sheet is safe to handle, a snapped one is not. Posts come out with the concrete footings where they can. Everything is double-wrapped, labelled and taken to a facility licensed to accept asbestos waste, and the ground along the line is checked before we backfill.
If you want the new fence in the same visit, say so at quote time. Doing both in one mobilisation is cheaper than two, for the same reason every small asbestos job has a minimum charge.
Do not lever, snap or “just pull out” a damaged fence sheet to tidy it up. That is the moment most of the exposure in a fence job happens, and it turns a contained removal into a contaminated yard.
