Clean Technology for Soil Remediation: Overcoming the Ingenuity Gap

Global site remediation isn’t keeping up

Recent estimates indicate that there are approximately 20 million contaminated sites or polluted pieces of land worldwide. That amounts to roughly 2.5 sites for every 1000 people living on Earth. Most sites are contaminated with a mixture of hydrocarbons, organics, metals, or salts(1). These sites make up the site remediation market.

Within Canada, only 4% of the remediation market is being addressed with cleanup efforts, similar to the 5% observed in Europe(2). At these low rates of remediation activity, contaminated sites are projected to double in the next decade(3), or at best—merely equal the rate of new site pollution(4).? In some countries actively trying to reduce their contaminated site numbers, sites have tripled over the last 20 years. Furthermore, despite massive investments in site clean-up, total site liabilities continue to increase by 3% per year.? Thus, numbers are increasing and the cost per site is accelerating. ?

Contaminated land has a cost on human health

The impacts on human health of these contaminated sites are significant. Approximately 2 million people die from contaminated site pollution each year. After the teenage years, contaminated soil is one of the leading causes of disability and premature death.

The messes that don’t make the headlines

Suppose the news were to report on this issue. In that case, you’d hear reporters say something like “the number of contaminated sites is doubling every decade, total site liabilities continue to increase despite massive ~130 Billion US$/year clean up investment, plus these sites cause adverse health impacts that kill the equivalent of a major city every year.”?

Yet, as an industry, we continue to clean up sites that do not need to be cleaned up and fail to clean up sites that desperately need to be cleaned.?

We’ve come a long way but we're still polluting more soil than we're cleaning

There is some good news in this story. Facility operators take the prevention of environmental releases very seriously, and the number of environmental releases has dramatically decreased since the 1990s. For example, 30% of fuel transfer facilities built in the 1970s and 1980s? would have had a significant environmental impact. As those facilities were decommissioned, a new generation of facilities emerged with impacts across less than 3% of new facilities. This is testimony to all of the engineers and operators who have put their minds to the issue of environmental releases. I would also point to the accounting profession for bringing environmental liability onto books, thus incentivizing clean and efficient operations.

Industrial activity has dramatically increased worldwide. Thus, despite reductions in incident rates over the last few decades, we are still polluting more sites than we are cleaning up. The pace or effectiveness of remediation efforts is not keeping up with the scale of environmental degradation.

The Ingenuity Gap

The term "ingenuity gap" was coined by Thomas Homer-Dixon, a Canadian political scientist, in his book "The Ingenuity Gap" published in 2000, wherein he used the term to describe the disparity between the increasingly complex problems faced by society and our ability to solve them through innovation and ingenuity. At a recent NICOLE workshop regarding the future of managing soil contamination, Christian Andersen from the Denmark Environmental Agency, used the term to describe the discrepancy in the remediation industry between the number of sites being impacted by industrial activity, the number of sites being cleaned, and the cost of cleanup. We aren’t cleaning enough sites or the right ones, and the cost of cleanup is too high for us to keep up with remediation at the rate that sites require remediation.

Clean Technology to close the Ingenuity Gap

Closing the Ingenuity Gap requires us to develop and deploy clean technologies like the ones created by EMS. Such technologies have at least some of the following characteristics:

• Low environmental footprints = economic and environmentally sustainable approaches.
• Leveraging natural processes =? using slower natural processes that clean sites and improve other ecological health indicators.
• High temporal and spatial density =? technologies must provide data densities at the level the current generation of Artificial Intelligence requires. Without this data density, you will try to clean up a site with one hand tied behind your belt.
• Autonomous operations = this reduces health and safety risks by reducing operator time in the field, it also reduces costs and allows environmental professionals to spend more time fixing sites and less time driving to and from sites.

Reducing the ingenuity gap is essential for sustainable development and future generations' well-being. We'll move in the right direction if we can use technologies that meet the above criteria. Employing EMS soil monitoring and site remediation technology on a global scale could take us there.?

Author: Steven Siciliano , EMS CEO & Co-Founder

Dr. Steven Siciliano brings his experience as one of the world’s foremost soil scientists to the task of helping clients to efficiently achieve their remediation goals. Dr. Siciliano is passionate about developing and applying enhanced instrumentation for continuous site monitoring and systems that turn that data into actionable decisions for clients.

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