Ecological Risk Assessment of Diffuse and Local Soil Contamination Using Species Sensitivity Distributions - Dealing with Contaminated Sites: From Theory Towards Practical Application - page 671

This list of examples illustrates that SSD-based conventional Risk Assessments
are used in a wide variety of practical contexts. The list should allow the readers
of this topic to envisage the versatile use of SSD-based results in the environmen-
tal assessment and management problems that they may encounter, so that they can
develop their own specific approach . We suggest that the use of SSDs should be
considered for novel problems in contaminated site management, by analogy to
the suite of examples presented above. To support this more practically, a few soil
related examples are worked out below.
14.14 Examples of Conventional Risk Assessment of Soil
Contamination with SSDs
Case studies on the evaluation of soil contamination with SSDs were selected mainly
from the Netherlands. This choice is justified, because no other nation has so much
experience with SSD-based assessments of soil toxicity.
To understand the cases and their reason for being, a limited introduction to the
Dutch national policy framework is provided. This introduction suggests that the
early Criterion Risk Assessments yielded a policy framework that itself triggered the
need for novel Conventional site assessment methods, which could be based in part
on SSDs. Thereafter, the case studies are described, to illustrate the way in which
SSDs are considered helpful in practical policies. As a comparison, contaminated
site assessment and management for the US are described. This single comparison
between two regulatory contexts shows that a different policy context can result
in highly different approaches, while still fundamentally based on the same Risk
Assessment framework.
14.14.1 Policy Framework Backgrounds - The Netherlands
Soil Quality Standards have been derived and applied in the Netherlands since
the 1980s (Van Straalen and Denneman 1989 ; Van de Meent et al. 1990 ). Two
standards were chosen: the Target Value (a level indicating “good quality”), and
the Intervention Value (a level triggering a refined assessments to determine the
remediation urgency (Swartjes 1999 )).
The implementation of these standards appeared to result in the three types of
soils, as expected (clean, moderate and highly contaminated soils). What was not
expected was that national inventories thereafter resulted in hundreds of thousands
of “cases of serious soil contamination” (Kernteam Landsdekkend Beeld 2004 ), and
that the moderate level of soil contamination (Target Value < local concentration <
Intervention Value) triggered large public concerns due to the vast areas where this
occurs. Moreover, due to the absence of formally accepted tools to appraise the soil
quality in these cases, many societal activities that involve soil use or soil trans-
fer became the subject of fierce debates. Both problems finally resulted in a large