Risk management of chemicals and contaminated land – from planning to verification - Environmental Deterioration and Contamination: Problems and their Management - page 247

values) should exceed the costs (decrease in human well-being, costs of the applied
technologies, material and energy, costs of legal and managerial provisions, overuse of
renewable and use of nonrenewable resources, etc.).

2.5.1 Verification of the environmental technology and the risk
management measure

Verification of an environmental technology follows the fulfillment of the planned effi-
ciency from the point of view of technological performance, environmental and social
costs and benefits at local, regional and global levels taking into account the economic
characteristics, cost efficiency and monetizable costs and benefits. The technological,
environmental and social aspects are not independent of each other; their interrelations
influence the final balance. Many of the “costs'' and “benefits'' cannot be expressed in
terms of money, but some basically nonmonetary values, for example, the treatment
of human health problems, value of contaminated and uncontaminated ground can.
It reflects our economy-based system that human health is measured in terms of the
cost of remediation of humans or that an aesthetic view is monetized based on the
willingness of people to pay for a cable car which takes you to the top. Groundwa-
ter may have a price (given that it is sold), but the diversity of the ecosystem does
not. However, there is a trend in the assessment of risk and socio-economic impacts
toward finding the realistic monetary values of all components of human well-being
including healthy environment. Another problem is the weighting of the technologi-
cal, environmental and social aspects which may be a subject of subjective perception
(a small local economic benefit may overrule relatively high regional environmental
costs). Weighting also depends on the economic and social standard of a region or
country (the acceptable risk level, the costs of health care and the value of human life
may greatly differ from region to region).
Gruiz et al. (2009a) implemented a complex evaluation system for innovative
soil remediation technologies. The multistage verification methodology includes the
following:

- Technological efficiency, characterized by the material balance, i.e., the mass flow

balance of the environmental phases and of the modified or eliminated pollutants;

- Environmental efficiency of the technology, characterized by the quantitative envi-

ronmental risk before, during and after the remediation, at the local, regional and
global levels;

- Cost efficiency (specific price of the “product'' namely of the treated air, water

or soil);

- Cost-benefit assessment including quantifiable and monetizable ecological, envi-

ronmental and social “costs'' and “benefits'';

- Cost-benefit of nonmonetizable, qualitative ecological, environmental and social

as well as cultural “costs'' and “benefits'' increase and decrease in the natural and
human well-being;

- Social “costs'' and “benefits'';

- Weighting and aggregating of all quantitative indicators and scoring of the

qualitative indicators;

- Characterizing and treating uncertainties.