Written by Stephen R. Henshaw, President and CEO of EnviroForensics & PolicyFind
As Seen in the March 2014 issue of the Cleaner & Launderer
The environmental remediation industry has been in full swing for the last 35 years, but it has only been in the past few years that the regulatory agencies have come to accept risk-based closures as a practical cleanup strategy. In the recent past, cleanup criteria was established for hundreds of individual chemical constituents for soil, surface water and groundwater. The cleanup criteria was based on the toxicological risks assigned to each of the chemical constituents and then further divided into different land-use scenarios (e.g. residential, commercial, wetlands, etc.)
This process made it easy for people to know what the target cleanup objective would be. That is not to say that there was not frustration over the toxicological science that was used to establish the cleanup criteria, but, because the closure numbers were laid out on a table, it made the discussion with the regulatory agencies black and white.
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