Sustainability and Remediation - Dealing with Contaminated Sites: From Theory Towards Practical Application - page 931

on health. Opportunities at the project design stage allow for the development of
synergy between the land use, development and remediation components of the
project. These opportunities might include, but are not limited to:

• Avoidance of unnecessary remediation work, as in the basement parking example

earlier, or simply by the appropriate placement of less sensitive parts of a devel-
opment so as to reduce the stringency of Risk Management objectives; see Case
Study in Section 20.5.1 .

• Designing the land use to facilitate longer term, lower input remediation meth-

ods, the so called extensive methods (Nathanail et al. 2007 ); see Case Studies in
Sections 20.5.1 . and 20.5.2 .

•

Linking remediation systems to renewable energy; see Case Study in Section
20.5.5 .

• Linking land use and built developments to renewable energy production and use

(AEA Technology PLC and r3 environmental technology limited 2004 ).

A consistent and structured approach to considering sustainability allows these
opportunities to be identified and exploited. Considering site sustainability is in
some ways analogous to considering site risks. The sustainability of a project will
have a status or condition that reflects the benefits and impacts of the project on
the various indicators of sustainability. Some form of assessment allows an evalua-
tion of this sustainability. Different interventions allow sustainability to be managed
to perhaps reach particular sustainability objectives or goals for a site, or simply
to maximise the sustainability that can be achieved. Hence, sustainable remedia-
tion includes stages of assessing and managing sustainability. This may well be
a cyclic process. As remediation work continues and either changes the site cir-
cumstances, or leads to new knowledge, project objectives may be revisited. So
the consideration of Risk Management and sustainability issues may be an iterative
process.
Since at present no general guidance exists in many countries, the approach for
sustainability appraisal needs to be agreed on a case by case basis. Supporting
frameworks are being developed to fill this gap (such as the developing SURF,
NICOLE and SuRF-UK approaches - see Table 20.3 ), but the choice of which
indicators to consider will largely depend on the project, its circumstances and
the stakeholders involved. Hence, the first step in sustainability appraisal is to dis-
cuss how sustainability will be incorporated along the decision making process and
which indicators are suited to describe the desired sustainability performance. A
qualitative approach can be used to screen the “sustainability” of a range of reme-
diation options. This may be sufficient to provide a clear cut decision, but if this is
not possible, the qualitative step should help to refine the remediation option short-
list and clarify what are the sustainability issues of particular importance for the
project.
These issues of importance may be linked to strong corporate or local planning
preferences, for example, the protection of local amenity green space, the avoidance