Progress in the management of contaminated sites in Europe, 2018

The European Commission Joint Research Centre has revised the Indicator "Progress in the management of contaminated sites in Europe" with the contribution of data provided by the National Reference Centres (NRCs) in member states and cooperating countries within EIONET and funded by the country to work with the EEA and relevant European Topic Centres (ETCs) in specific thematic areas related to the EEA work programme and has just published the Status of local soil contamination in Europe.

The Land and Soil Indicator LSI003 aims to answer the following policy-relevant questions: What is the estimated extent of soil contamination? How much progress has been achieved in the management and control of local soil contamination? Which sectors contribute most to soil contamination? What are the main contaminants affecting soil and groundwater in and around Contaminated Sites? How much is spent on cleaning up soil contamination? And how much of the public budget is used? An overall improvement in the management of contaminated sites in Europe has been observed.

To answer to these policy relevant questions, after a fair and strong debate on definitions (I can say it because I partecipated in this discussion) among all countries, the experts agreed on measuring the so-called "progress in management" according the total number of sites that fall in a certain site status. For this scope, six different site statuses were defined.

Site status 1: sites where polluting activities took/are taking place: a) estimated and b) registered — (rather than ‘sites registered’).

Site status 2: sites in need of investigation/still to be investigated or under investigation where there is a clear suspicion of contamination (NB: it may not be relevant to all countries, in some countries there is a transition from status 1 to status 2 following risk assessments).

Site status 3: sites that have been investigated, but no remediation is needed (unless land-use changes, i.e. in application of the principle of fit for current use).

Site status 4: sites that need or might need remediation or risk-reduction measures (RRM), including natural attenuation (monitoring to be part of the preparative investigations how to remediate).

Site status 5: sites under/with ongoing remediation or RRM (probably common to all countries).

Site status 6: site remediated or RRM completed or sites under aftercare measures (i.e. sites that are monitored after remediation). Monitoring to be performed to confirm that remediation or RRM goals are achieved.

The main data source for those information on 6 site statuses are the inventories and also in this field, the situation is very scattered among EU countries. Also in Italy, the country I know better, we have some inventories that are managed by the regions, other by regional EPA, in other regions is under construction, and ISPRA, as italian national EPA, is trying to build a national database with automatic feed by the regions. I don't have time to go in deep as it is not the scope of the article, but it is not so easy as anyone may imagine.

Coming back to relevant policy questions, it is important to understand something more about expenditures in particular if there is a specific funding mechanism for orphan sites and the large majority of surveyed countries have a national program to deal with it.

Another key question is: how much is the expenditure among private and public investment? With the available data provided by replying countries, the average overall expenditures to assess soil 'pollution' account for €4.3 billion where on average more than 32 % of total expenses comes from public budget. Only the fools may think that applying the "polluter pays principle" would mean that the private would pay 100% of the needed interventions, for several reasons:

1. The state may be the polluter (when it is the owner of heavy industry for example).
2. There will ever be the company that would bankrupt for convenience or for other reason.
3. There is the historical contamination (as an example: many aquifers have large quantities of chlorinated compounds) as DNAPL in many EU industrialized cities. This kind of contamination has its origin when the conomic development went faster than environmental legislation, when it was not forbidden as for example dump some industrial residuals in the factory backyard or using it as basement for football fields (I am not joking...it happened in the past).
4. You don't find who is the polluter among a certain number of neighbouring companies in an industrial district. Whoever has worked in one of the 41 contaminated sites in the Italian National Priority List knows what I mean.

To sum up the results in a general picture of the 39 surveyed countries, 2.5 million sites have been estimated where polluting activities have taken place considering the artificial surface. Nowadays, there are more than 650 000 registered sites where polluting activities took/are taking place in national and regional inventories of replying countries; more than 65 500 sites have been remediated.

The production sectors contribute more to local soil 'pollution' than the service sectors (60 % compared to 32 %). The most frequent contaminants are mineral oils and heavy metals. The most commonly used remediation procedure seems to be the ex-situ technique “dig-and-dump”, which implicates the excavation and off-site disposal of contaminated soil.

My personal view is that progress in management of contaminated sites is worth to be monitored on regular basis because it is important for our lives and for the future generations. The future monitoring could take into accunt also new instruments like GoogleMap to let the EU citizen to know not only the global number of cont'd sites in the country but the site status of the contaminated area at 100 meters to his/her home. In an open and inclusive society, public environmental information should be freely and easily accessed. It would be a citizen right, wouldn't it? INSPIRE directive tells you something?

You may imagine that as I am one of the experts involved by JRC you may think I am entusiast about this report. In fact that is exactly what I think! No surprise! JRC did a great job to understand more on soil pollution with this easy to read book, distinguishing between countries but making a straordinary effort to find a common vocabolary.

Marco Falconi

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