Risk management of chemicals and contaminated land – from planning to verification - Environmental Deterioration and Contamination: Problems and their Management - page 249

the evaluated references, systematic and official verification and specification of
environmental technologies and measures.
Innovative technologies are in a rather controversial situation: they are highly
desired to increase the number of alternatives and best available technologies (BATs),
but many of them are not properly documented, evaluated and are not regis-
tered/archived in an accessible way. Market entry of the innovative remediation tech-
nologies is restricted due to the lack of a uniform verification system and method for
acquiring, evaluating and interpreting the results of demonstrations. Also, there is an
urgent need for sustainable remediation, environmentally sound, inexpensive, environ-
mentally friendly technologies for the long-term quality management of soil. Applying
verified innovative site assessment and remediation techniques ensures higher quality
at lower costs compared with traditional or nonverified techniques (Gruiz et al., 2008).

2.5.2 Technology verification as a regulatory tool
Practical, useful and uniform evaluation and characterization of the innovative tech-
nologies would be necessary to shorten the time between development and application,
increase confidence and promote commercialization. Following the United States and
Canada, Europe also has started its Environmental Technologies Action Plan (ETAP)
with the aim of establishing a mechanism to validate the performance of and increase
confidence in environmental technologies (ETAP, 2013) and to improve the compet-
itiveness of European technologies on the global market. ETV PROMOTE (2013),
a research project aims to set up an efficiency control and performance verification
system for soil and groundwater protection and rehabilitation. The system will be
based on a performance verification concept and generic testing as applied by a Euro-
pean network of testing centers (www.promote-etv.org). Another European initiative is
TESTNET (2013) with the aim of designing, developing and testing an environmental
technology verification (ETV) system. An overview on ETV is given in Chapter 7.

3 NECESSARY INFORMATION FOR ERA, SEA AND LCA

K. Gruiz
More comprehensive knowledge is needed in order to be able to assess the expected
impacts of an environmental management option in the complexity of economic, envi-
ronmental and social “costs'' and “benefits''. Information needed should include:
the price of chemicals, technologies and their accessibility on the market, existing
alternatives, their price and other market information, value of the environment, char-
acteristics of the environment, natural and human health status all over the world,
adverse effects and deteriorations, etc. However, in spite of an exponential growth,
the necessary information is not fully available today. The following pieces of informa-
tion for the evaluation of the technological, environmental and socio-economic costs
and benefits are the most important ones:

- Information on chemicals;

◦

Physical, chemical properties;

◦ environmental fate and behavior;