Bringing Sustainable Management of Contaminated Sites into Practice – The Role of Policy and Regulations - Dealing with Contaminated Sites: From Theory Towards Practical Application - page 1018

management related considerations meet. Assessment of contaminated site prob-
lems has often to be performed in complex social environments and solutions must
be found that satisfy environmental and social-economic needs. For policy makers,
the designers of policy instruments such as regulations, subsidies, tax incentives and
special programs for public-private partnership, it is nowadays important to explore
and promote solutions to contaminated site problems in a multi-stakeholder envi-
ronment. Also from the viewpoint of the public authorities, the “regulators”, who
have to implement policies and make decisions concerning a site-specific solution
for a contaminated site problem, a contaminated site is not merely a “technical prob-
lem” that can be solved by engineering alone. Perception of the problem by different
stakeholders may concern human health or ecological issues, but also financial and
social aspects. This also holds true for the solution of a contaminated site problem.
Will health risks be sufficiently reduced? Who will bear the responsibilities and lia-
bilities if the solution does not achieve what was planned or when new scientific
insights reveal shortcomings of the solution? In view of these complex questions,
public authorities should be very focussed on choosing the right Risk Assessment
and decision support tools and be aware of their strength and weaknesses and the
uncertainties that may remain unaddressed. In risk-based (fitness for use) solutions
to contaminated land problems, uncertainties in social and economic domains may
even be larger than the uncertainties related to adverse effects of residual contami-
nation, and this may lead to a (temporary) lower priority for improving methods for
classical toxicological Risk Assessment.
The complexity of contaminated site problems and their solutions was not per-
ceived immediately after the first discoveries of major incidents of the 1980s,
like Love Canal, New York State; Times Beach, Missouri; and Lekkerkerk, the
Netherlands. Policy perspectives concerning soil contamination have changed grad-
ually during the almost 30 years that most industrialized countries have addressed
these problems. This chapter will review these developments and describe the cur-
rent generally accepted framework for contaminated site Risk Assessment and
management from a policy perspective. It will also briefly introduce the general
soil protection strategy that is currently under development in Europe.
Soil contamination is one of the many threats to soil resources that have to be
addressed in soil protection, and “historical” or “legacy” contaminated sites are
only one part of the general contamination problem, which includes also ongoing
and new contamination. However, policies for contaminated sites have already been
in place for decades in many industrialised countries. International networks have
contributed significantly to the general consensus within the participating European
countries on how to deal with contaminated sites. This policy framework is known
as Risk-Based Land Management (RBLM) (Vegter et al. 2002 ). RBLM is firmly
rooted in contaminated site Risk Assessment practices from Europe, the US and
Canada, but it has the wider perspective of sustainable development, in particular
the need to consider the timing of any intervention and the future consequences of
any particular solution in relation to environmental, economic, social and cultural
dimensions.