Benchmarking of Decision-Support Tools Used for Tiered Sustainable Remediation Appraisal

Sustainable remediation comprises soil and groundwater risk-management actions that are selected, designed, and operated to maximize net environmental, social, and economic benefit (while assuring protection of human health and safety). This paper describes a benchmarking exercise to comparatively assess potential differences in environmental management decision making resulting from application of different sustainability appraisal tools ranging from simple (qualitative) to more quantitative (multi-criteria and fully monetized cost-benefit analysis), as outlined in the SuRF-UK framework. The appraisal tools were used to rank remedial options for risk management of a subsurface petroleum release that occurred at a petrol filling station in central England. The remediation options were benchmarked using a consistent set of soil and groundwater data for each tier of sustainability appraisal. The ranking of remedial options was very similar in all three tiers, and an environmental management decision to select the most sustainable options at tier 1 would have been the same decision at tiers 2 and 3. The exercise showed that, for relatively simple remediation projects, a simple sustainability appraisal led to the same remediation option selection as more complex appraisal, and can be used to reliably inform environmental management decisions on other relatively simple land contamination projects.