Scientific and engineering improvement of environmental risk management - Environmental Deterioration and Contamination: Problems and their Management - page 403

sustainability metrics, life cycle assessment, and industrial ecology involve the quantifi-
cation of a large number of potential impacts. Completing comprehensive assessments
for all potential effects requires excessively large amounts of data, knowledge, time
and resources. To find the optimum cost-benefit balance for the assessment itself, it
would be very important to fit the impact assessment for the problem and find the nec-
essary scale of sophistication and/or comprehensiveness. Some of the impact-assessing
IT tools offer the selection of impact categories and end points, but the knowledge and
understanding of the decision makers is essential.
8 INNOVATIVE RISK REDUCTIONTECHNOLOGIES
Environmental risk may be reduced by preventive, restrictive or remedial measures.
Restrictions can mitigate emission by reducing the produced and used amounts of
hazardous agents and, as a consequence, the environmental concentration of these con-
taminants. Restrictions can be applied on the receptor side of the conceptual risk model
by protecting potential receptors by regulating land uses and let only less sensitive
receptors use the (potentially) contaminated land. Restrictions are typical regulatory
tools, applicable equally at local, regional or global scale.
Preventive measures need intensive monitoring and early warning close to or
directly in the source. Improving the production technologies, the methods of use
for chemicals and products as well as preventive technologies may bring advantages.
In-pipe preventive technologies may reduce the emitted amount before emission, by
trapping the contaminants by filters, traps, absorbers, adsorbers, incinerators. End-
of-pipe technologies reduce the risk directly after emission by wastewater treatment
or by blocking the transport pathways using barriers or streaming the emitted amount
into a less risky scenario, e.g., the N- and P-contaminated runoff water into a wetland.
This last solution crosses the border with remedial technologies.
Remediation technologies are used to reduce the risks posed by contaminants
already released into the environment, i.e. contaminated air, water and soil or com-
plex contaminated sites. Remediation technologies have seriously evolved in the last
20 years, but are still under development, mainly those which focus on bio- and
eco-engineering methods, and utilize the natural risk reducing potential of the environ-
ment. Natural attenuation of hazardous contaminants in the groundwater has been
learned in detail and many of the natural processes have been studied and adapted to
detoxification and remediation technologies. They include mineralization and humus
formation in soil, bioleaching, microbiological and microbiology-mediated stabiliza-
tion of contaminants in soil and sediments of surface waters, aquatic and terrestrial
plant technologies, complete ecological systems such as artificial lakes, wetlands, spe-
cially developed and arranged soil volumes and living machines. Biotechnology and
eco-engineering can direct and optimize living organisms and communities to rejuve-
nate, remediate and rehabilitate contaminated or otherwise deteriorated environment
by using their natural genetic and biochemical potential.
The acceptance of these innovative biological and ecological technologies is unfor-
tunately low, in spite of the fact that they are sustainable over the long term, inexpensive
and eco-friendly. Less natural innovations such as in situ flushing and in situ chemical
oxidation of contaminated soil and groundwater or the subsurface, and permeable