Sustainability of land remediation. Part 1: overall analysis

A comparative assessment was carried out of the technical and environmental sustainability of five different contaminated land remediation projects completed in the UK between 1997 and 2002. The remediation technologies employed were in situ stabilisation/solidification, soil washing, ex situ bioremediation, cover system and excavation, and disposal to landfill. A further objective of the assessment was to highlight areas of sustainability concerns for the individual technologies and projects. The assessment is based around four principal criteria defined by the authors. Each project was assessed using both an overall multi-criteria analysis, detailed in this paper (Part 1), and a study of the detailed impacts on an individual project basis, detailed in Part 2.