Sustainable Remediation – The Application of the SuRF-UK
Framework By Ms Nicola Harries – Project Director, CL:AIRE
Sustainable Remediation Forum-UK (SuRF-UK) is a cross sectoral initiative between Contaminated Land: Applications in Real Environments (CL:AIRE), industry, regulators and academia. It was launched to enable the brownfield and contaminated land industry to share their understanding and demonstrate how the industry was considering sustainability within their work. It was set up in 2007 with funding from the Homes and Communities Agency facilitated by CL:AIRE and actively collaborates with similar initiatives elsewhere in the world including Europe, USA and Australia. Around 50 public and private sector organisations have taken part in SuRF-UK meetings since it started in 2007.
SuRF-UK is a focused group of remediation practitioners and regulators from the UK interested in providing sustainable approaches to the management of land contamination. Its primary goal has been to develop a framework to embed balanced decision-making in the selection of a remediation strategy to address land contamination, as an integral part of sustainable development and then demonstrate its application through case studies. The framework document titled “A framework for assessing the sustainability of soil and groundwater remediation” was completed and published in March 2010 with a foreword signed by Department of Communities and Local Government, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Homes and Communities Agency, Welsh Assembly, Environment Agency, Scottish Environmental Protection Agency and Environment Agency (Northern Ireland). The framework document can be downloaded from
www.claire.co.uk/surfuk .
The framework With the increasing importance of corporate and government policies requiring the demonstration that sustainability is being thought about, the wider impacts of remediation projects related to climate change, resource management, water use and soil functionality are all being increasingly considered, along with wider social and economic benefits.
SURF-UK has defined sustainable remediation as “the |102| ENVIRONMENT INDUSTRY MAGAZINE
practice of demonstrating, in terms of environmental, economic and social indicators, that the benefit of undertaking remediation is greater than its impact, and that the optimum remediation solution is selected through the use of a balanced decision-making process”. It encompasses sustainable approaches to the investigation, assessment, and management (including institutional controls) of potentially contaminated land. This balance is based on a set of underpinning principles (Table 1) within which the balancing of criteria such as environmental, social, and economic costs and benefits occurs.
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