Ambiguous legal regulations

Monika Rzeźniczak, technical director at Lion Environmental, talked about the most common problems with the interpretation of legal regulations concerning contaminated areas in Poland and the technical and organizational problems resulting from this fact.

Example? "It often happens that in the local spatial development plan, for example, industrial functions with a possible commercial function are indicated. According to the current interpretation of the law, such land should be treated as a potential commercial area regardless of the investment project"- says Monika Rzeźniczak. "If the investor intends to allocate a plot of land for production activities, should he still compare the results of land quality analyses with the most stringent standards for first category land?" - she wonders. According to Monika Rzeźniczak, it is difficult to talk about economic legitimacy here. Remediation works should consider the nature of the activity that the investor intends to conduct in a given area.

Risk assessment and environment state results from legal conditions and constitute a mandatory element of the remediation plan project. Katarzyna Klukowska, a specialist in geology and the environment at CDM Smith, talked about the evaluation procedure and problems caused by current legal situation. In her opinion, the Polish legal infrastructure describing remediation processes leaves many understatements.

Confirmation of contamination means that "substances that pose risk are present in our area in excessively abnormal volume" - Klukowska explains. However, the problem arises when the permissible level of substances in the ground should be established, especially when they are not listed in the Annex to the Ordinance of the Minister of the Environment of 1 September 2016 concerning method of ground surface contamination assessing. Why? Because, according to Klukowska, the guidance on substances that are not included in the Regulation is unclear. "Everything we do results from the subjective evaluation of a given expert. I can, for example, consider that there is significant pollution in a given area; someone else, guided by slightly different guidelines, will say that there is no such threat. We do not know whether the analysis should be of a qualitative or quantitative nature. The effect of such ambiguity is unfortunately the possibility of manipulating arguments"- she says. There are no unambiguous criteria and standards for groundwater, which makes it very difficult to assess the occurrence of threats.

In this context, the opportunity to compare legal and administrative solutions used in other countries is particularly valuable. Piotr Kociołek, director for environmental protection at Panattoni Europe, presented the principles of law regulating remediation of land in Italy: from the definition and administrative procedures, through the participation of individual stakeholders in the process of remediation, up to the applicable quality standards for both soil and groundwater.

"The Italian remediation market is well-developed, there are various technical solutions available" - claims Piotr Kociołek. Among the positive features of the Italian system, among other things he indicates: the possibility of applying local standards regarding threshold concentrations, or the competence and organizational support of external services even for small municipalities, which on their own would have difficulty in substantively dealing with remediation.

Not only Italian example was presented. The British experience in the context of implementation of the Water Framework Directive was spoken by Robin MacDonald, and on the policy of protection of groundwater in conditions of water shortage - Andre Chiaradia, American expert on environmental protection and health and safety.

New remediation technologies

Part of the Remedy conference dedicated to new remediation technologies presented, inter alia, innovative applications of dispersive, colloidal (liquid) activated carbon, with which the groundwater pollution can be effectively removed. "We create technologies that are directly injected into the ground to remedy contaminated areas" says Gareth Leonard, Managing Director at the European branch of Regenesis. "One of our latest solution is liquid activated carbon [...]. We have created it to help the biological degradation of organic contamination". The speaker described advantages of this technology, the correct distribution of the substance and its application depending on the type and degree of soil permeability, or the long-term effectiveness of activated carbon depending on the scale of pollution in a given area.

Gareth Leonard also presented other modern methods of groundwater remediation on site (in situ), for example: combined adsorption and increased biological degradation, aerobically accelerated self-cleaning of groundwater, increased chloride reduction and chemical oxidation. Each of the techniques depends on the time, place and specificity of the land. Good results are achieved by combining individual activities and their proper distribution over time, in particular in the case of areas with a high level of pollution, eg oil-derived hydrocarbons. The REMEDy participants had the opportunity to learn about specific case studies on the actual use of innovative remediation techniques discussed by Gareth Leonard.