Archive for March, 2005

COMMON FORUM NEWS NR. 2

Monday, March 14th, 2005

COMMON FORUM MEETING IN VIENNA
Planning meetings is a hard job since it is almost impossible to find a date that suits everybody. Moreover meeting possibilities in Vienna in May appeared less than anticipated. The date of the COMMON FORUM meeting in Vienna is set at Thursday and Friday 12& 13 May. I regret to have to disappoint a number of people with these dates.
Details on agenda will follow. The meeting will end early Friday afternoon to allow departures on Friday late afternoon and evening (if you do not want to stay for the weekend).

CONSOIL
The Consoil programme committee met in a freezing Menorca to prepare the CONSOIL 2005 conference which will take place in Bordeaux from 3 till 7 October. The conference will bring many people together from research, policy and practice with interest in contaminated land and management the soil and water system. International interest in these area’s is increasing, especially due to further developments of the EU thematic strategy on soil protection. The commission will publish a proposal for a directive and a communication in November 2005. CONSOIL hopes to have some impression of the contents of these documents at the conference and will try to formulate recommendations from the CONSOIL community for policy and research, in a special “keynote” session.
There will be many interesting papers and special sessions at CONSOIL, and many opportunities to arrange special meetings like for the COMMON FORUM or the (adHOC) Working Group on Contaminated land. I do hope to meet many COMMON FORUM members at CONSOIL.

JOINT
The EU funded JOINT ( Joint Technical Approach for Decontamination of Soil and Groundwater) project is now ending. JOINT organized two workshops to interlink soil and groundwater related EU research projects and tried to distill the state of the art and the progress made. This appeared to be a quite difficult task, because many researchers are more interested in writing new proposals than in disseminating results from finalized projects. Besides the activities related to the workshops, most of the JOINT team also contributed to the technical digests of EUGRIS. A third workshop (oktober 2004) has been organized together with SCAPE (Soil Conservation and Protection for Europe) to focus the many research recommendations that had been made in the reports of the working groups of the EU Thematic strategy. This workshop produced a brochure introducing a research agenda for soil protection in Europe, which was presented at the Vital Soil EU policy conference in The Hague(november 2004). As a final result JOINT will produce some more and specific recommendations for contaminated land management and related groundwater contamination. JOINT thinks along the following lines:
In discussing the policy relevance of fairly basic research one has to look 10 to 20 years ahead . Research to guide these future policies and to address future policy needs has to start now. If we are optimistic, preventive approaches in the EU chemical policies and preventive measures concerning leakages and spills at industrial facilities will be in place. Agricultural problems will be partly solved depending on political driving forces, but will not require new basic science. The types of problems that do need input from basic science to find better solutions are the ones related to the urban environment. The urban environment will expand very fast in the next 20 years as several EU development scenarios have shown. Moreover, the behaviour and ecological functions of urban soil and water systems are less well known, because most of our knowledge is coming from studies of more or less undisturbed natural and agricultural systems. Therefore JOINT will recommend one or two “Urban Aquaterra” Integrated projects ( at least two phases: one on understanding the system and one on managing the system). The projects can build on the knowledge gathered by projects like CABERNET on the management side, and can complement the results of the Aquaterra project on riverbasin management approaches.
Concerning short and medium term research there will be recommendations for technology development, demonstration and acceptance, and harmonisation of approaches. To keep everything consistent and integrated there should be some accompanying project taking over the role JOINT played up till now.

NICOLE
The NICOLE steering committee met in Leuven, 25 Februari. A COMMON FORUM representative(Joop Vegter this time) is always invited to attend the “ghest” part of the meeting. Interestingly Philippe Quevauviller and Claudia Olazábal from EU DG Environment were present to communicate the latest developments of the Groundwater Directive and the Thematic Soil strategy. Concerning the Groundwater directive COMMON FORUM shares the worry of NICOLE that the directive may impede long term extensive managed or monitored natural attenuation approaches for historically contaminated groundwater. Philippe reassured us. Additional text has been included in the Groundwater directive to avoid less desirable side effects of the directive for historical groundwater contamination, in line with the previously proposed risk management zone idea, but without using the term “risk management zone” which most EU officers seem to associate with flooding.
The presentation of Claudia Olazabal did not contain many new elements. Most of the EU DG ENV ideas are known by now since a powerpoint presentation which has been sent to the Memberstates ministries of Environment, illustrating their latest plans for a Soil FrameworkDirective. This will be further outlined to Member States at a meeting of the highlevel EPRG (Environment Policy Review Group) in Brussels tomorrow (15 March).

The current discussion about “unexcavated contaminated soil” and EU Waste Framework Directive was introduced by Geert Cuperus, a Dutch consultant specializing in this field.The NICOLE opinion on this issue was that considering unexcavated contaminated soil as waste would be very undesirable. This is -as far as I know- in agreement with EU memberstate positions.

Johan van Veen, secretary of NICOLE, reported on the SNOWMAN project, aiming at cooperation between national research programs in the field of contaminated land (including groundwater). SNOWMAN is currently drafting proposals for research topics for a joint program. SNOWMAN will ask NICOLE and COMMON FORUM to review these proposals.

The next NICOLE workshop and meeting will take place in Stockholm, 16& 17 June. The subject will be risk assessment with emphasis on ecological risk assessment.

THE SOIL-WASTE DEBATE
You may remember that EU offered three choices concerning unexcavated contaminated soil:

A -The exclusion of unexcavated contaminated soil from the scope of the waste definition and Framework Directive, and dealing with this issue in a different context, i.e. the Soil Thematic Strategy?

B- Maintaining unexcavated contaminated soil in the scope of the waste definition and Framework Directive?

C - Maintaining unexcavated contaminated soil in the scope of the waste definition and Framework Directive but developing a special regime for its management/remediation under the Soil Thematic Strategy?

As far as I received feed back on this nobody seems to favour option B, and most favour A. There is however a price to pay for the exemption of unexcavated soil (A) or a special regime for this (B). EU intervention and EU decision making criteria will be needed to implement option A or C. Even the most “minimalistic” approach exempting only historical contamination may require EU definitions of “historical” ( currently very different in memberstates due to the date soil legislation came into force) and “contamination” (again very different in memberstates). It may even lead to EU wide soil numbers.
There may be a solution (not offered in the questionnaire) that does not require EU criteria. That is excluding ALL unexcavated soil (contaminated or not), unless the definition of waste applies. This definition is according to The European Waste Directive(75/442/EC Article 1a:
“Waste means any substance or object which the holder disposes of or is required to dispose of persuant to provisions of the national law in force. ”
So if somebody wants to dispose soil (even clean) it is a waste (The reuse of clean soil or even slightly polluted soil will not be a problem, there is a market for clean soil in most countries). In case of severe soil contamination where some intervention or even excavation is required by the national law in force, than unexcavated contaminated soil indeed becomes a waste. The latter situation seems to cover the van der Walle case.

Malcolm Doak offered to present a COMMON FORUM position concerning unexcavated contaminated soil at a meeting about this subject, in Brussels on 4 April. Does COMMON FORUM have a position in this debate?