Hundreds of clandestine drug labs uncovered in Western Australia have all been "addiction-based", not organised crime operations, Police Commissioner Karl O'Callaghan says.

The commissioner told a parliamentary estimates hearing on Monday there hadn't been "one single clan lab detection which can be classed at an organised level for the widespread distribution of drugs".

"Every clan lab found in WA has been an addiction-based clan lab, in other words it's not an organised crime lab," he said.

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"It's a lab that can generate very small amounts of meth for a user or a couple of users."

Mr O'Callaghan said organised crime operations were not easily detected and were much more sophisticated than what was being found currently.

"One of the things contributing to the increase in clan labs is that many people are now finding our how it's done and they find out what pre-cursor chemicals that are required to create meth.

"They are generally available easily over the counter at a hardware store and the pre-cursor chemicals that are required, the actual extraction chemicals that are required, they can be bought at a chemist."

Mr O'Callaghan said people were beginning to realise they could make the substances quite simply with not much equipment.

"We're seeing an upward trend but at the same time the community are also becoming more aware of it.

"I do point out not all clan labs are set-ups that are found in houses.

"Some are just cobbled together in the back of cars or in the bush, we're just finding more and more of these."

Meanwhile, the WA Police Union conference on Monday heard that 696 clandestine drug laboratories had been uncovered in WA since 1998, out of around 4000 found nationally.

Chemist Paul Newell, from the contaminated sites branch of the WA Department of Environment, told the conference that those were only the labs detected by police.

"We might be generous in saying we are catching something like five to 10 per cent," he said.

WA was on track to break last year's record number of lab busts, Mr Newell said.

Drug labs ranged from very simple "box labs" that could be taken by motorcycle into remote bush areas to large, sophisticated operations that had been found in the eastern states run by trained chemists, he said.

The hazards involved in clandestine labs included the risks of explosion, toxic fumes, poisoning and chemical burns, and things could go wrong very quickly, Mr Newell said.

Houses used as drug labs could remain contaminated for many years, posing very real health risks to occupiers, he said.

Police lobbying since 2005 had resulted in national guidelines being released in April this year to promote safe dismantling of labs and the decontamination of premises used as labs, Mr Newell said.