Sustainability and Remediation - Dealing with Contaminated Sites: From Theory Towards Practical Application - page 891

Fig. 20.2 The three elements
of sustainable development

economic

overall sustainability

environmental

social

defined in the 1987 Brundtland Report. There are three elements to sustainable
development, and hence sustainability, as shown in Fig. 20.2 : environment, econ-
omy and society.
There is no “standard” technique for sustainability appraisal (for example like
ISO 14040 for Life Cycle Assessment). Generally, sustainability appraisal tends
to be based on assessments of indicators. Indicators are metrics or assessments of
individual factors that contribute to an overall understanding of sustainability, for
example: direct costs, greenhouse gas emissions etc (CL:AIRE 2009 ). Sustainability
appraisal techniques employ some means of aggregating individual assessments
of indicators to provide an overall understanding of “sustainability”. Qualitative
and quantitative approaches may be used in sustainability appraisal. The more
widely used techniques are summarised in Table 20.1 , which also highlights which
techniques have been applied in contaminated site management (CSM), and to
what extent each technique assesses each of the three elements of sustainability.
Sustainability appraisal methods are described in more detail in Section 20.3.4 .In
general, quantitative approaches are limited to particular aspects of sustainability,
but may be useful for evidence gathering as part of an overall appraisal. It is also
worth pointing out that environmental Risk Assessment is a technique which has
a place within sustainability appraisal, but for contaminated site management it is
also the dominant basis for decision making as discussed in Section 20.2.2 .

20.2.1.2 Using Indicators in Sustainability Appraisal

Sustainability appraisal is often linked to particular policy perceptions and objec-
tives. This means that there are two broad approaches to identifying individual
sustainability indicators:

• policy orientated indicators that are linked to specific policy goals, often with

some threshold or target for “acceptability” included, and