Abstract
Soil pollution is a relatively new environmental concern. It has become a priority in many industrialised countries during the last two decades, after the inventory of locations in which contamination was posing a risk to people and the environment. At present, many industrialised countries have legal guidelines and criteria for handling soil sanitation programmes (Siegrist, 1990). The overall extent of soil pollution, however, is still to be completely determined. In the Netherlands, surveys indicate that the number of polluted sites may be as high as 600,000, with some 100,000 sites in which urgent cleaning-up action is necessary (Meeder and Soczó, 1991). These sites are mainly former industrial sites. The costs of the cleaning-up operations have been estimated at 50 billion Dutch guilders over the course of the next 20 to 25 years (Meeder and Soczó, 1991). Cleaning-up operations are largely paid for by the government and then possibly recovered through legal action. Successful cost recovery and increasing limitations on the use of contaminated sites have led to an increase in voluntary action by the polluters or by the users of the site (cf. Keuzenkamp et al., 1990; von Meijenfeldt and Schippers, 1990).
“Man can live for five weeks without food, for five days without water, but not as much as for five minutes without air”. “Measures for keeping air and water clean were in the foreground of all efforts undertaken to protect the environment. Not as much attention was paid to the protection of the soil& ” (Thoenens, 1990).
This research was supported by the special programme on soil protection in the Netherlands (Speerpuntprogramma bodembescherming) and was developed in co-operation with the National Institute of Public Health and Environmental Protection (RIVM), Bilthoven. The author would like to thank Dr. Kees Versluijs (RIVM) for his thorough comments, constant support and help during all stages of this application. The author also wishes to thank the experts who participated in this project, making available their experience and knowledge for the assessment of value functions.
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Soil clean-up can follow two main strategies: sanitation or isolation. Sanitation aims at restoring the site’s multifunctionality. If, in this process, soil is excavated and treated, then additional objectives are: making the excavated soil multifunctional, or reducing residual contamination to levels suitable for reuse as building material, or disposing of the contaminated soil. Isolation of the contaminated site aims at minimising the exposure to the contaminants and at finding optimum uses for the site. This chapter focuses on the sanitation strategy and on the objective of multifunctionality for the site and the excavated soil. The selection of the most suitable strategy is another type of decision problem, which could be tackled with techniques similar to those presented in this chapter.
The system of A, B and C values has undergone several changes since its first publication in 1983. The A level (now called target level, and indicated with S) and the C level (now called intervention level, and indicated with I) have been revised on the basis of new toxicological and eco-toxicological evidence of soil pollution. The B level is now called test level, indicated with T, and is the average of the intervention and target values. Since the case study and the assessment of the value functions were made during the transition between old and new standards, the references to the A, B and C levels are kept in the remainder of the text. The interested reader is referred to Berg et al (1993), Berg and Roeis (1991) and Denneman and Robberse (1990) for an overview of the research programme which has led to an in-depth revision of the original standards.
Detailed descriptions of the most common remedial techniques can be found in VROM and RIVM (1995), Arendt et al. (1993), Eijsackers and Hamers (1993), Arendt et al. (1990) and Assink and van den Brink (1986).
In particular, the emissions to air and surface water contribute to the specification of the adverse effects of pollution on man and ecosystems, and thus to the achievement of objective 1. The bioavailability of the contaminants and their leaching behaviour in the cleaned soil are relevant for objective 2, especially when the decision includes options for reusing the soil for other purposes (for instance, as building material). Finally, a more detailed classification of the materials involved in the process allows for a better analysis of objective 3, especially when the distinction between waste materials and reusable cleaning-up products is important.
The estimates are uncertain, due to modelling and measurement uncertainty. For each value, uncertainty is known as a range around the nominal value, expressed as a percentage of potential variation (+ or ). The uncertainties are the following: the levels of cadmium for A6, A7 and Ag can vary up to 42%, while the remaining alternatives are uncertain up to a maximum of 12%. The estimates for mineral oil are very uncertain, with an average of 40% and a maximum uncertainty of 75% for A5. Zinc uncertainty is lower, with a maximum uncertainty of 28% for A6, A7 and Ag and a level lower than 8% for the remaining options. The result of the comparison of pollution levels with standards should also be considered as depending on the uncertainty of the standards. Uncertainty analysis for threshold levels can be found in Berg (1992) and Berg and Roels (1991).
This holds for the soil concentrations. For groundwater, since the concentrations are low compared to the C level, it was decided to take into account a smaller range, from O to C.
Background levels in unpolluted areas (cf. Edelman and de Bruin, 1986) could be used to represent a clean soil, especially when low levels of some chemicals play a natural role in the soil. In this application it is simply assumed that in a clean soil the concentration of contaminants is zero.
A2 is the worst option for E1, E2, E3 and E5. A3 is the worst option for E4. The value difference between A2 and A3 for E4 is 0.02.
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Beinat, E. (1997). Case study: expert-based value function models for cleaning up a polluted site. In: Value Functions for Environmental Management. Environment & Management, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8885-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8885-0_7
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