Abstract
The scale of land-contamination problems, and of the responses to them, makes achieving sustainability in contaminated land remediation an important objective. The Sustainable Remediation Forum in the UK (SuRF-UK) was established in 2007 to support more sustainable remediation practice in the UK. The current international interest in ‘sustainable remediation’ has achieved a fairly rapid consensus on concepts, descriptions and definitions for sustainable remediation, which are now being incorporated into an ISO standard. However the sustainability assessment methods being used remain diverse with a range of (mainly) semi-quantitative and quantitative approaches and tools developed, or in development. Sustainability assessment is site specific and subjective. It depends on the inclusion of a wide range of considerations across different stakeholder perspectives. Taking a tiered approach to sustainability assessment offers important advantages, starting from a qualitative assessment and moving through to semi-quantitative and quantitative assessments on an ‘as required’ basis only. It is also clear that there are a number of ‘easy wins’ that could improve performance against sustainability criteria right across the site management process. SuRF-UK has provided a checklist of ‘sustainable management practices’ that describes some of these. This paper provides the rationale for, and an outline of, and recently published SuRF-UK guidance on preparing for and framing sustainability assessments; carrying out qualitative sustainability assessment; and simple good management practices to improve sustainability across contaminated land management activities.
Highlights
Land contamination is recognised as a threat to soil and water quality, and to the wider environment (Van-Camp et al, 2004), and it can pose significant health, environmental and social pressures (Environment Agency, 2009)
This paper describes Sustainable Remediation Forum in the UK (SuRF-UK)'s latest guidance on preparing for and defining (‘framing’) the sustainability assessment and for a simple qualitative ‘entry-level’ to sustainability assessment in remediation projects (CL:AIRE, 2014a) It presents suggested ‘sustainable management practices’ for application across all phases of contaminated land activities from planning and procurement, site investigation through to implementation and verification of remediation works (CL:AIRE, 2014b)
SuRF-UK's approach to framing is broadly consistent with the approach taken by the Dutch Sustainable Remediation Forum (SURF Netherlands et al, 2015) and NICOLE (NICOLE, 2011), and has been applied by the SURFs in Australia, New Zealand and other countries (Bardos et al, 2013; SURF-ANZ, 2011) as well as by the proposed ISO standard (ISO 2015)
Summary
Land contamination is recognised as a threat to soil and water quality, and to the wider environment (Van-Camp et al, 2004), and it can pose significant health, environmental and social pressures (Environment Agency, 2009). There is an active international debate about how best to ensure that land contamination is managed in a sustainable manner (Bardos, 2014). In this context, sustainable remediation is the process of effectively managing contaminated land risks to human health and the environment in a manner that minimises the environmental footprint, maximises societal benefits, and minimises the costs of those remediation activities. This paper describes SuRF-UK's latest guidance on preparing for and defining (‘framing’) the sustainability assessment and for a simple qualitative ‘entry-level’ to sustainability assessment in remediation projects (CL:AIRE, 2014a) It presents suggested ‘sustainable management practices’ for application across all phases of contaminated land activities from planning and procurement, site investigation through to implementation and verification of remediation works (CL:AIRE, 2014b)
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