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SuRF-UK
SuRF-UK Steering Group
What is Sustainability and Why Consider It?
The Role of Brownfield Land
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SuRF-UK Framework Document

Sustainable Remediation Forum

SuRF-UK is the United Kingdom’s Sustainable Remediation Forum – an initiative set up to progress the UK understanding of sustainable remediation.

What is Sustainable Remediation?

The process of identifying sustainable remediation is defined by SuRF-UK as “the practice of demonstrating, in terms of environmental, economic and social indicators, that the benefit of undertaking remediation is greater than its impact and that the optimum remediation solution is selected through the use of a balanced decision-making process.”

Why adopt Sustainable Remediation?

Soil and groundwater remediation, although designed to remedy contamination and reduce risks to human health and/or the environment, also has the potential to cause environmental, economic and social impacts. If poorly selected, designed and implemented remediation activities may cause greater impact than the contamination that they seek to address.  The best solution is remediation that eliminated and /or controls unacceptable risks in a safe and timely maneer, and which maximises the overall environmental, social and economic benefits of the remediation work.

What are the objectives of SuRF-UK

Phase 1

• The objective of Phase 1 was to develop a framework in order to embed balanced decision making in the selection of the remediation strategy to address land contamination as an integral part of sustainable development’.  This phase of work was completed in March 2010 with the publication of the SuRF-UK Framework Document.

SuRF-UK Framework Document

The framework document sets out why sustainability issues associated with remediation needs to be factored in right from the outset of a project. It identifies opportunities for considering sustainability at a number of key points in a sites redevelopment or risk management process.

SuRF UK: A Framework for Assessing the Sustainability of Soil and Groundwater Remediation

Phase 2

Objectives
Phase 2 of the project will assess the practical implementation of the SuRF-UK framework to provide the user community with a generic checklist of indicators to enable clear, effective and proportionate sustainable remediation assessments. The project will road-test the generic approach with real case studies, to disseminate key learning points and to refine the SuRF-UK framework if necessary.

Tasks

1. To develop worked examples to illustrate how the SuRF-UK framework may be applied to a range of (re)development scenarios, contaminant types and remediation technologies/techniques.
2. To develop a structured checklist of practical sustainability indicators for use in a SuRF-UK sustainable remediation assessment.
3. To test the practicability of the above indicators during real sustainability assessment negotiations.
4. To consult with a wide range of stakeholders across the contaminated land and brownfield sector to validate the indicator checklist, provide opportunities for external evaluation and case studies, and provide a platform for an influential sustainable remediation assessment approach in the UK.

This phase of work started April 2010 and will run through to April 2011.