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.

» Author: Jesse Gore, Imade E. Imasuen-Williams, Abass M. Conteh, Kelly E. Craven, Monica Cheng, Murray Korc

» Reference: Science of The Total Environment, Volumes 563?564

» Publication Date: 01/09/2016

» Source: ScienceDirect - GPP

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