Sustainability and Remediation - Dealing with Contaminated Sites: From Theory Towards Practical Application - page 904

unlikely to have knowledge of contaminated land management in any detail, and
they will be considering a wide range of sustainability issues.
Decisions taken at these “higher” levels limit the range of remediation
approaches that can be undertaken, and the impacts of these limitations may be sub-
stantial. Hence a sustainable remediation framework needs to consider and influence
more than simply remedy selection once all preceding decisions have been made. It
needs to create an opportunity for influence at least at site management planning and
local area planning, where major opportunities for improving sustainability exists.
This opportunity not only includes the example above of avoiding unnecessary
remediation interventions, but also linkage of remediation with other sustainable
development opportunities such as renewable energy (as illustrated in the “Sanergy”
case study in Section 20.5.5 ). A corollary of this engagement is the need for con-
taminated site management professionals to be able to deal with a wide range of
interests and stakeholder interests, and that they can demonstrate the importance of
the opportunities provided by sustainable remediation (see Section 20.2.5 ).
SuRF-UK has taken the view that from a pragmatic point of view for its sus-
tainable remediation framework there are two key stages in making sustainable
remediation decisions (CL:AIRE 2010 ):

• during the project design phase;

• at point of implementing the remediation aspects of the design.

Sustainable remediation considerations should be an influence on strategic deci-
sion making at local and regional level policy frameworks, but this is not explicitly
addressed in the SuRF-UK framework which has focussed on decision making from
a site or project level, illustrated in Fig. 20.6 .
The SuRF-UK framework distinguishes project design decisions from decisions
connected solely with remedy selection. It suggests that there is a point of no return
or “glass ceiling” after which site or project based decisions cannot easily be revis-
ited, for example because a planning or regulatory approval has been received.
Beyond this point sustainable remediation decision making is necessarily limited
to remedy selection that dovetails with the project design.
Even if decision making is confined to remedy selection, sustainability is an
important consideration, for the following reasons:

• The cumulative effect of individual project and site based remedy selection

decisions may well be large at local and regional scales, and the sustainabil-
ity appraisal used for planning policy decisions at these scales is unlikely to
take contaminated site management opportunities into account in a substantive
way; and

• At a development project scale, decisions about the nature of construction of

a built development are likely to have substantial sustainability implications.

8 Figures 20.6 and 20.7 are taken from the SuRF-UK “Open Forum” Meeting, 18th March
2009, available from http://www.claire.co.uk/index.php?option = com_content&task = view&id =
182&Itemid = 78&limit = 1&limitstart = 6 . These figures were redrawn in CL:AIRE 2010