Can we identify sustainable remediation techniques for contaminated land?

摘要

Those involved in the clean-up of contaminated land tend to regard most remedial processes as intrinsically sustainable if they reduce the legacy of historic pollution. However, as contaminated land investigation and remediation become a commodity it is appropriate to take a wider view. If clean-up of contaminated land were an industrial process occurring in a factory how would it rank in terms of sustainability alongside other industrial processes? This paper examines the tools that are currently available to assess sus-tainability and finds that there are major gaps both in data and methodologies for contaminated land and a tendency to confuse sustainability with durability. Much more work must be done before we can rank cleanup technologies in terms of sustainability and more importantly use sustainability to drive remediation of the many sites which are seriously damaged and also damaging to the local environment but cannot provide commercial return to a developer.