Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
feasibility of the actions envisaged”. In parallel, the US EPA has established a
Green Remediation initiative
which focuses on achieving aspects of environmental
sustainability in remediation.
16
The common requirement for sustainability appraisal amongst these international
initiatives is to support the adoption of more sustainable approaches for remediation
projects. The predominant interest for achieving this is in providing for better project
design and remedy selection. However, there are some important additional func-
tionalities for sustainability appraisal from a business or corporate point of view that
are emerging from these discussions: benchmarking technologies and providing a
means for organisations to report sustainability progress across a number of projects.
For example, the recent EURODEMO project
17
has suggested the use of energy
efficiency as a means comparing different remediation technologies (EURODEMO
2007a
,
b
). While the majority of this chapter focuses on sustainability from a project
based point of view, Section
20.3.3
discusses these other appraisal interests.
Nathanail (
Chapter 25
of this topic) places remediation in the broader context of
sustainable Brownfield regeneration, following on from the work of CABERNET
18
and RESCUE
19
and shows that an integrated approach to project formulation is
indeed possible.
20.2.6 Communicating Sustainability and Risk Management
Risk-based site management has found its way into soil or environmental protec-
tion policy frameworks in many countries in the world. The fitness for use principle
for remediation of contaminated sites supports cost-effective ways of returning con-
taminated sites to beneficial use. However, where there is a number of stakeholders
there is usually a corresponding number of opinions on how to come to the most
cost-effective and sustainable way of dealing with a contaminated site.
The engagement of stakeholders is important in sustainable decision making for
three reasons. Firstly, stakeholder opinions can be an important source of informa-
tion about particular aspects of sustainability (Therivel
2004
). A stakeholder can be
viewed (1) as any party that can affect a decision, and (2) any party that may be
affected by the decision. Some stakeholders may be directly involved in decision
making (for example the site owner and regulator); others may not have a direct
involvement but may still be influential (for example local community interests).
Secondly, inclusive decision making processes improve the robustness of decisions
by widening the decision making consensus and so reducing the possibility that
decisions will need to be revisited because of objection in the future. Thirdly, inclu-
sive decision making is seen as part of good governance, which may be explicitly
16
http://clu-in.org/greenremediation
/
17
http://www.eurodemo.info
/
18
www.cabernet.org.uk
19
www.rescue-europe.com
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