« COMMON FORUM NEWS NR. 17 & 18 Report of the meeting in Bilbao 2-3 /11/2006 | Home | COMMON FORUM NEWS NR. 20 (updated) Next meeting Stuttgart 24 & 25/04/07 »

COMMON FORUM NEWS NR.19 a request and some information

By Joop | January 21, 2007

Dear All,
Jörg Frauenstein sent me a request on behalf of the SNOWMAN project, the first programme for transnational research projects in the field of soil and groundwater which is financed by national research funders. SNOWMAN would like to invite COMMON FORUM experts as “Peer Reviewers” to assess the proposals. In addition to this there is interesting information from NICOLE and Claudia Olazabal en Paul Bardos suggested some interesting publications.

1] SNOWMAN
As announced during the Budapest meeting last year the SNOWMAN-Call really started with December 2006.
SNOWMAN would like to invite experts from the Common Forum to be “Peer Reviewers” in the selection process of proposals for these transnational projects.
Detailed information about the scientific topics of the call and the procedure are available on the SNOWMAN homepage.
http://www.snowman-era.net
In case of any requests or expressing interest you can send an e-mail directlyJoerg Frauenstein (joerg.frauenstein@uba.de) until end of January.
2] NICOLE
NICOLE prepared a discussion paper, which describes the NICOLE position the Thematic strategy for soil protection and the proposed Soil framework directive see attachement NICOLE soil position paper
3] INTERESTING DOCUMENTS ON EUGRIS
Some contaminated land guidance still in use in the UK dates back to the 1980s and has not been available in downloadable form, in particular:
o Contaminated Land Reports (CLRs) 1 to 6 and 12, and
o Publications of the former Interdepartmental Committee on
the Redevelopment of Contaminated Land (ICRCL).
Defra and the Environment Agency have recently completed scanning these to PDF, and these are now available for download
For more information (and some important caveats) go to:
http://www.eugris.info/DisplayNewsItem.asp?NewsID=371

4] STUDY ON ENVIRONMENTAL TECHNOLOGIES
Claudia Olazabal informed us of the report on “Eco-industry, its size, employment, perspectives and barriers to growth in an enlarged EU”, carried out by Ernst & Young and RDC-Environnement for the European Commission over a period between April 2005 and September 2006. This report has been put online on DG ENV website:

http://ec.europa.eu/environment/enveco/studies2.htm#industry-employment

There is a whole part on the market for soil remediation, which is quite interesting. However as always these are the views of the consultants and not necessarily of the Commission. Never the less the annual turnover in the Soil remediation sector in EU and number of employees is quite impressive

Some revealing figures, from this study (approx estimates):

Turn over of the sector (billions/year) Number of employees (EU25)
Air quality protection 15.8 120.000
Water treatment 80 320.000
Soil remediation 5.2 36.000
Waste management 50 843.000
Noise control 1.95* 30.000

*(this actually the expenditure, not the declared turn over of the sector)

Topics: News |

Comments are closed.