Bringing Sustainable Management of Contaminated Sites into Practice – The Role of Policy and Regulations - Dealing with Contaminated Sites: From Theory Towards Practical Application - page 1049

It is obvious that the ultimate aim of a contaminated sites policy is to increase
the amount of self-developing sites. The third generation policy is trying to stim-
ulate this. The second generation, where opportunities for public-private financing
were created, made the development of potentially developing sites possible. Even
with all policy efforts taking away barriers and stimulating sharing of costs and
risks by public and private parties, some real hard-core contaminated sites remain
unaddressed. To revitalize these or even to manage these, command and control
interventions by public authorities are needed. Hence, there is still a niche for the
first generation policy approach.
It should be noted that the borderlines between self-developing, potentially devel-
oping and non-developing sites can be quite different in countries due to differences
in strength of their economy and value of the site. In countries or regions where land
is scarce and, hence, where every site has a huge economic potential, the amount
of non-developing sites may be small or even non-existent. In other countries self-
development of sites may be impossible for economic reasons. These differences are
one of the main reasons that countries need to have different policies for contami-
nated sites. However, irrespective of whether a site is self-developing or not, public
authorities should control sites in such a way that the human and environmental
risks related to the current use of the site are reduced to an acceptable level.
Generation 2 and 3 approaches to contaminated site redevelopment may involve
many stakeholders that can contribute financially and may help to achieve goals set
in other areas of policy. There is a substantial body of EU regulations that can be
used for dealing with contaminated sites, as shown in Fig. 23.6 . If all these could
be made to work in concert, remediation of contaminated sites would receive A
strong push.
Although national contaminated site policies can be quite different, there is a
common need for development of better technologies for detection of contamination
and remediation of contaminated soil and groundwater. Current solutions for con-
taminated site problems become more and more embedded in other socio-economic
activities (or problem solutions) at the local and regional scale. Policies promoting
decentralised decision-making, minimizing top-down command and control regu-
lation by using a managerial approach, do require that local authorities or private
parties that have to manage and restore contaminated sites, have access to ade-
quate tools for assessment, decision-making and to remediation technologies that
fit their purposes. Exchange of information and practical experiences in a “learn-
ing by experience” process is of utmost importance for the success of decentralised
decision-making. So the need for demonstrations of technologies will increase, but
in addition there is an increasing need for demonstration of complete remediation
and redevelopment concepts.
The developments described above lead to the following conclusions as described
in the European Brownfield Agenda ( www.eubra.eu ):

• There is a need to develop and demonstrate cost-effective site characterisation

methods. This may include simple Risk Assessment tools and improved deriva-
tion of soil quality standards for decision-making. The HERACLES project may