UTILIZING RBCA TO ESTABLISH MUTUALLY ACCEPTABLE CLEANUP STANDARDS

摘要

The development of the risk-based corrective action (RBCA) process has given environmental professionals a consistent decision making tool to determine the risk posed by contamination to human health and the environment. The objective for implementing RBCA standards is to remove the uncertainty from the remediation process thus allowing the actual risk of the contamination to be managed. The biggest benefit in implementing the RBCA process is the calculation of cleanup standards that are mutually acceptable to both regulators and responsible parties. The development of mutually acceptable site-specific risk-based cleanup standards allows the responsible party to implement more cost-effective remedial alternatives such as engineering and institutional controls and intrinsic remediation. The path to establishing mutually acceptable cleanup standards using RBCA can be very challenging and requires cooperation between the regulator and responsible party because of the subjectivity within the process. Although the RBCA process is becoming more widely accepted, the process appears to still be limited by fundamental conservatism and not science. The RBCA process is not 100% objective, which allows the belief systems of the regulator, risk assessor, and responsible party to be introduced into the process. As a result of the introduction of one's beliefs, the RBCA process becomes subjective in the determination of the exposure assumptions used in the RBCA calculations.