Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
society has to bear; the exploitation of Natural Attenuation limits those costs.
However, CLARINET also found that this overarching philosophy did not mean
that all remediation projects are necessarily sustainable development. CLARINET
suggested that considering the true contribution of remediation work to sustainable
development is an emerging challenge at least as great in its difficulty as the devel-
opment of risk based decision making, and with the same capacity to profoundly
change how we manage contaminated land in the future (Bardos et al. 2002 ;Vegter
et al. 2002 ).
Interestingly, the same point of view was emerging in the industry community,
both amongst site managers and the service providers in NICOLE (the Network
for Industrially Contaminated Land in Europe). 10 NICOLE held a workshop in
Barcelona, Spain in 2003 on the “Management of Contaminated Land towards
a Sustainable Future: Opportunities, Challenges and Barriers for the Sustainable
Management of Contaminated Land in Europe” (Bardos 2003 ). This meeting con-
cluded that the meanings ascribed to terms such as “sustainable” or “sustainable
development” vary widely. It also concluded that there was no common language
for discussing contaminated site management in the context of sustainable develop-
ment. The meeting view was that “without clear definitions everybody can claim that
they are acting sustainably when sometimes perhaps they are not”. NICOLE decided
that it would be both a major challenge, and also a major achievement, for NICOLE
to catalyse the development of a common framework, widely used across Europe in
the same way that risk based decision making has become commonly used.
More recently, several initiatives have begun to address this challenge. A
Sustainable Remediation Forum was established several years ago in North
America, 11 which has recently produced a “White Paper” where its members give
their review of the current state of the art (SuRF 2009 ). A Sustainable Remediation
Fo r um i n t h e UK 12 (SuRF-UK) has also been set up and a “Sustainable remedia-
tion working group” established by NICOLE. 13 A SURF-Australia has also been
recently established, 14 and ASTM international have established a standards devel-
opment committee to develop a sustainable remediation standard. 15 Their work has
begun a process that will likely lead to a clearer picture of what constitutes “sus-
tainable remediation” in Europe. The importance of this work has been highlighted
by the inclusion of the following definition of remediation in the February 2009
draft text for the emerging European Soil Framework Directive: “When deciding on
the appropriate remediation actions, Member States shall give due consideration
to social, economic and environmental impacts, cost-effectiveness and technical
10 NICOLE also began as an EU funded project, but is now a self-funding network www.nicole.org
11 www.sustainableremediation.org
12 www.claire.co.uk/surfuk
13 http://www.nicole.org/WorkingGroups/WGSustainableRemediation/default.aspx
14 http://www.crccare.com/working_with_industry/surf.html
15 ASTM International, originally known as the American Society for Testing and Materials
(ASTM), www.astm.org
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