Scientific and engineering improvement of environmental risk management - Environmental Deterioration and Contamination: Problems and their Management - page 386

chemical substances which have a screening value or other environmental quality crite-
ria in the relevant regulations. These chemicals may constitute only a small part of the
contaminants existing at a brownfield or other industrially or illegally contaminated
sites. Another poor practice is that only those chemical substances which can be ana-
lyzed by a certain laboratory are involved in site assessment design and measurements
are only carried out in that contaminant concentration range which can be analyzed,
instead of one which may have an adverse effect.
Verified engineering tools, published information about them, and accelerated
market entry would be necessary for the integration of the new technologies into the
problem-specific tool batteries. Increasing ERM efficiency and lowering uncertainties
in this way would result in improved environmental quality.
The “Death Valley'' between the development of innovative materials, meth-
ods and technologies and their market entry is deep enough to hinder or prevent
many innovations from becoming widely applied in practice. Most innovative meth-
ods/technologies have never been put into practice, but disappear in the “Death Valley''
even after having been funded and demonstrated. This means not only that they are
missing from practice, but also that the funds used for their development have been
wasted. On the other hand, a good marketing strategy may ensure market entry for
those technologies that are not verified or technologies with inadequate application,
mainly for those which promise fast results and can show a tactile product. A “heal-all''
powder or “super inoculant'' in a bag or bottle can be sold. But the skills of a microbi-
ologist or biotechnologist who can control naturally occurring microorganisms in the
soil or waters in order to detoxify, degrade or transform contaminants and remediate
contaminated soil, are hard to sell. And this is because the type of information on the
environmentally friendly innovative technologies is not adequate, the publication of
successful applications is missing, the attitude of authorities and vendors is too tech-
nical and the trust of the nonprofessionals in innovation, particularly in invisible, i.e.,
“natural'' technologies is negligible.
There are some research and development projects ongoing in Europe which aim
to support the survival of innovative tools of environmental risk assessment and risk
reduction, and their utilization in an optimal ERM, providing the best and most
suitable tool battery for potential end users. Several European projects and networks—
introduced in Chapter 8 in this Volume—have established the basic theory and practice
of the efficient management of contaminated sites. EURODEMO and EURODEMO

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(2013) have been specialized for soil and groundwater remediation, EUGRIS (2013)
and the Hungarian MOKKA (2006-2008) have covered innovative environmental
monitoring and risk assessment tools as well as innovations in environmental risk
reduction. NICOLE (2013) has gathered the practical professionals into the network
of “Industrially Contaminated Land'' concentrating on technical innovations and their
dissemination.
The innovation cruise of environmental technologies is shown in Figure 11.5. The
starting point of innovation is an idea of the innovator, which is motivated by the end
users' need. Contractors, owners, vendors and other end users require new tools to
have a suitable choice for every environmental problem in order to fulfill legislation,
monitoring and reduction of the risk of environmental problems. The development
of the new technology is a tiered process, from the experimental validation of the
idea, through the stepwise scale-up of the technology, to studying the basic process