Risk management of chemicals and contaminated land – from planning to verification - Environmental Deterioration and Contamination: Problems and their Management - page 244

Figure 9.5 Risk management by reducing the risk inside and outside the industrial contaminant source.
masks, the residents can be protected from drinking contaminated groundwater
by ensuring piped or bottled water, risk posed by agricultural cultivars can be
reduced by soil amendments or by selecting genetically suitable species, which, for
example, can adapt to or avoid bioaccumulation of contaminants. On the other
hand, Figure 9.5 indicates that the opportunity for RR in some system components
is very limited or the risk cannot be reduced even if it became unacceptably high,
for example, contaminated atmosphere can hardly be treated. Ecosystem members
cannot be protected from contaminated air, and the methods to clean up surface
waters, watersheds, seas and oceans and soil in large areas are rather limited.
Natural ecosystems or species inhabiting contaminated waters and soils cannot
be protected at all, the only possibility is the remediation of the contaminated
environment. There are limited possibilities to remediate minor surface waters by
aeration, by the application of living machines (see Volume 4), using additives or
modifying their biological diversity. The risks posed by contaminants to the agroe-
cosystem can be controlled and reduced by selection of proper cultivars (tolerant
or non-accumulating species).
Assessment during implementation includes continuous monitoring and a detailed
final characterization of the relevant compartments of the environment. The concep-
tual model truly maps and illustrates the sources, transport and fate of contaminants,
land uses and receptors, as well as the size and extension of the impacted area (see
Figure 9.8). If several contaminants are present and different adverse effects occur
together, the risks should be aggregated. The trends and the time dependence of the