Strengthening social-environmental management at contaminated sites to bolster Green and Sustainable Remediation via a survey

摘要

The Green and Sustainable Remediation (GSR) movement demands informed, integrated, and holistic management of contaminated sites. As such, GSR may become increasingly relevant in developing countries such as China, where vast areas of contaminated land require clean-up. Among other efforts, the World Bank together with China's Foreign Economic Cooperation Office is facilitating GSR adoption through the development of a guideline on social-environmental management. However, there are no existing studies that have considered how the established remediation industry perceives its effectiveness in addressing the various social-environmental management aspects, or how certain aspects have rooted. Without this information, it may be difficult to guide social-environmental practice forward, or introduce GSR into developing remediation markets with any precision. Therefore, a questionnaire survey of remediation participators was undertaken with principal component analysis (PCA) applied to the data to help group the various aspects. The PCA extracted two components for environmental management, ascribed to: (1) on-site/local impacts; and, (2) widespread impacts, and three social management components, ascribed to: (1) community inclusion; (2) economic gain; and, (3) health, safety, and welfare. It was found that the aspects the industry are most familiar with historically are generally dealt with more effectively than those that have only recently been introduced by the GSR movement. In particular, bolstering the management of widespread environmental impacts and giving greater regard to the economic gain of remediation, may be beneficial. In developing countries, public engagement is often very limited, necessitating improvement in remediation policy and guidance. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.