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Sustainable remediation involves evaluating remediation projects for their social, economic, and positive and negative environmental impacts. The key concept is incorporating sustainability into remediation projects is beneficial because system level and holistic thinking helps to: (a) identify opportunities to improve the net benefit of the project, and (b) highlight specific negative project impacts that can be mitigated to limit their adverse socio-economic and environmental impacts. Project-level application of sustainable remediation is scalable and can involve a minimal approach on one project and can be more comprehensive on another project.

Related Articles:

CONTRIBUTOR(S): Paul Favara

Key Resource(s):

• White Paper Sustainable remediation white paper: Integrating sustainable principles, practices, and metrics into remediation projects
• Quantifying Life Cycle Environmental Footprints of Soil and Groundwater Remedies. ER-201127 Report
• Green Remediation: Incorporating Sustainable Environmental Practices into Remediation of Contaminated Sites

Introduction

Sustainable remediation has been an industry focus area since 2006, when a small group of individuals met to assess if the remediation industry could benefit from a more formal adoption of sustainability concepts). Since that time, the topic has quickly launched into a key industry focus area. The main challenges in early sustainable remediation were how to define it and what the goals and outcomes would be. By 2011, three main variants of sustainable remediation were being applied to remediation projects around the world:

1. Green Remediation. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its Green Remediation Primer, which focused on the green elements of sustainability-mainly the environmental attributes associated with remediation.
2. Sustainable Remediation. The Sustainable Remediation Forum released its white paper in 2009, addressed “Sustainable Remediation,” which is inclusive of social, environmental, and economic considerations.
3. Green and Sustainable Remediation (GSR). In 2011, the Interstate Technology and Regulatory Council (ITRC) released its guidance on “Green and Sustainable Remediation (GSR)”. The GSR phrase was a compromise between the members of the work groups that advocated green remediation and sustainable remediation.

Since sustainable remediation first became a topic of interest in the remediation industry, it has spread around the globe with SURF-like organizations in Canada, Brazil, Italy, United Kingdom, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Colombia, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Most of these organizations have their own guidance documents and white papers. In addition to the variable definitions and different geographies to consider, different organizations have their own definitions of sustainable remediation and internal processes and guidance on how to implement it.

Frameworks for Implementation

There are a number of approaches that can be used to implement sustainable remediation. Frameworks underpin most of these approaches.

Sustainable remediation can be implemented in a phased approach, where sustainability is looked at only within the boundaries of the specific project phase (left side of Fig. 1). SURF provides a framework that advocates thinking holistically about sustainability and thinking about integration of sustainability through time—backward to take insights from previous project phases, and forward by thinking about future project outcomes and considering those sustainability impacts in the current phase of.