Remediation and Management of Contaminated Soil - Sustainable Practices in Geoenvironmental Engineering - page 433

expensive to determine and obtain the appropriate data. Comparison of various remedia-
tion options at a baseline is a simpliied and logical approach.
Some of the requirements for successful implementation of sustainability assessment
tools are:
• Involvement and training of stakeholders
• Clear guidance documents regarding deinitions
• Standardized metrics and validation
• Well-deined frameworks
• Documentation of sustainable remediation practices
• Regulatory and/or inancial incentives
Implementation of sustainability assessment tools will allow evaluation and selection
of the remediation technologies that will minimize environmental impact and reduce
resource requirements. In addition, it will enable and promote implementation of more
sustainable practices.
11.6.3 Case Study Using a Sustainability Approach
GoldSET © (Golder Sustainability Evaluation Tool), a sustainability decision support tool
for project planning and design, was created by Golder Associates (http://www.goldset
.com) (Mulligan et al., 2013). It is a robust and transparent framework to embed sustainable
development practices into design, construction, and operational decision-making phases
of any project. The sustainability tool has been applied for various applications such as
site remediation and mining tailings around the world. The tool operates through the
assessment of different project options against a number of quantitative and qualitative
indicators for each of the three dimensions of sustainability: environment, society, and
economy. Indicators provide a way of describing the situation surrounding the project
with a weighting scheme allowing the relative importance of each indicator to be relected.
The irst step in an evaluation involves the description of the site, the deinition of the
project objectives, and the identiication of key issues of concern to all stakeholders. The
second step is to identify and elaborate on various remediation options and/or alterna-
tives that are thought to be suitable for the site speciicities and project restrictions. Those
options will then be assessed from an economic, social, and environmental viewpoint, and
in some cases, from a technical viewpoint. The scoring scheme attached to each indicator
provides a mechanism to assess the performance of each option with respect to the indi-
cator. Together, the entire set of indicators should be representative of a project's perfor-
mance, impacts, and cost.
All qualitative indicators have scoring schemes minimally consisting of three levels.
Quantitative indicators have both relative and absolute scoring schemes. For the speciic
quantitative indicators such as greenhouse gas emissions and net present value (NPV), the
framework is adopted to a level of detailed calculators. Relative scoring schemes assign
a score of 0 to the lowest performing option while assigning 100 to the best performing
option. Absolute scoring schemes have a ixed scoring scale independent of the options,
and score the options relative to this ixed scale. These ixed values were adopted from
accredited organizations (UNEP, WHO, etc.) as benchmarking values for consumption of
natural resources or concentration of pollutants in the media.