Sustainable Remediation White Paper—Integrating Sustainable Principles, Practices, and Metrics Into Remediation Projects

Abstract

The remediation industry was born in the late 1970s, following a steady stream of highly publicized discoveries of toxic chemicals in landfills, drinking water, and even neighborhoods. The government responded to these discoveries of environmental contamination. Environmental laws were passed at the state and national level, and programs were created within environmental regulatory agencies to oversee and sometimes fund the cleanups. Industry and consultants kept pace by hiring staff, building programs, and initiating cleanups. The remediation industry was off at a sprint before it had learned to crawl. With the public demand for swift and sometimes immediate cleanups, responsible parties and the remediation industry invested heavily in energy-intensive engineered projects, such as groundwater pump-and-treat systems, soil excavation and off-site disposal, incineration, and thermal treatment. The public’s attitude was that no cleanup could be initiated soon enough or implemented fast enough. While such energy-intensive remediation systems are well intended, they generally have not achieved acceptable cleanup levels (National Research Council [NRC], 2005). These energy-intensive engineered remedies frequently cannot overcome the basic technical limitations encountered when recovering contaminants from the environment once the contaminants are widespread and dilute. As a result, most engineered groundwater remediation systems reach a certain concentration and go no further regardless of the energy expended. The concentration that can be reached is often far higher than the cleanup level. Within the last ten years, a growing body of information suggests that global climate change can be correlated with fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide releases into the atmosphere. As members of the broader environmental industry, remediation experts are well aware of this concern and have firsthand knowledge of the potential contribution of energy-intensive remediation systems to global climate change. For example, at one remediation project in New Jersey, it was estimated that the difference between two proposed remedies could be as high as 2 percent of the annual greenhouse gas emissions