On any journey through unfamiliar terrain the experienced traveler checks the map early and often. On extended sojourns, especially those through lands that change in appearance but gradually, the re-checking of the plan grows less reflexive. The novice traveler may keep the map in the backpack and walk without thinking, only to find too late that the trail branched subtly many miles back. Had the map been consulted more regularly the retracing of steps would not have been necessary.

In the long walk that is public policy for environmental protection, particularly policy made to address the contamination of land and water by the acts of humankind, the first steps were taken in the 1970s and 80s. The map at the time was drawn in reflection of a pressing need for protection of the commons. American rivers were on fire, Love Canal was purchased by its municipality for development as a school, the entire town of Times Beach was evacuated after the discovery of pervasive dioxin contamination—the course the first part of the walk would take was clear.

During the two decades since those initial steps the landscape has changed, our knowledge of chemicals and their behavior in the environment is substantially greater; our statutory framework for industrial process compliance and release prevention has matured; our perspective of our relationship to the environment, particularly the atmosphere and the “greenhouse” effect, has changed. In light of these changes, there is no better time than the present to unshoulder our pack, to take out the old map and check: Is the course we charted 25 years ago still true?

In the context of environmental remediation, namely those efforts focused on the removal of an introduced, presumably hazardous material, environmental policy to date has largely been endpoint driven. A case in point is the many states that have established non-degradation policies for groundwater resources, and have interpreted these policies to require mitigation endpoints that are the equivalent of natural conditions prior to a release of a foreign substance.

Over the span that has passed since the passage of the fundamental rules (Superfund, Clean Water, a raft of state and local laws and regulations), tens of thousands of remediation projects have been undertaken. In addition to the environmental benefits realized, the regulating and regulated communities have amassed a substantial store of perspective-changing experiential wisdom. What we’ve learned includes:

• It’s a lot easier to break something than it is to fix it, and sometimes we can’t make the thing we broke as good as new.
• Different substances behave differently in the media to which they’ve been released.
• The earth has a remarkable capacity to heal itself, and in terms of input energy for the healing process, is often far more efficient at bringing a remedy than is human engineering.
• Sometimes the engineered remedy brings greater environmental damage than the condition it seeks to cure.

Long-raging Debate
A debate over the cost and benefits of environmental remediation has raged for as long as there have been regulations requiring response actions. Most frequently, the tradeoffs are measured simply in terms of dollars and alternatives—could a financial resource earmarked for investment in a remedial action be more beneficially invested elsewhere?

In the mid-1990s, for example, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was commissioned to examine the vast store of data generated during the preceding decade of leaking underground fuel tank response actions. The LLNL study was mandated by the legislature (Senate Bill 1764), as was a committee formed to review the study’s findings and recommend, if it found fitting, changes to California regulatory policy. The 1764 committee found that in many cases the extent of contamination was limited, that the threat to natural resources was not as great as had once been estimated, and that, dollar for dollar, the cost associated with a restoration to pre-release conditions did not bring comparable benefits.

The question of expense and benefit will endure, but now it can be joined by an inquiry that comes as a function of the experiential wisdom—can our efforts to repair inadvertently create more of a problem than we attempt to cure?

There is presently no metric in the conventional regulatory structure to measure the deleterious aspects of a remedial action. The nine Superfund remedy selection evaluative criteria, for instance, ask only that potentially viable remedies be evaluated using endpoint-related criteria (protection of human health and the environment through contaminant, removal or treatment), process-related criteria (ease of implementation and cost), and community acceptance.

But what of the impact of the conventional metric-selected cleanup approach on the community? What of its carbon footprint? Where is the evaluative criterion that accounts for and balances the damage brought by the remedy?

Perhaps the question has gone unasked for so long due to its almost counter-intuitive nature. How could an effort made to remove a released substance be in itself detrimental to the health and well being of the neighborhood? And, how could there possibly be a response action more protective of health and the environment than the removal of as much of an offending substance as possible?

Consider the case of a rail-to-trail project in an urban area. The traditional means for preparing this land for redevelopment involves the removal of the uppermost several feet of soil and the transport of this material to a distant landfill for disposal. In most cases (and in our example here), former rail lines contain elevated levels of relatively inert contaminants, typically lead and arsenic employed for railroad tie preservation and weed control. If a 15-foot wide trail were to be prepared by traditional means:

• 8,800 cubic yards of soil would be excavated and transported for disposal.
• Almost 600 truck trips would be required to transport the material and deliver clean import for grading. The truck trips with their associated emissions, noise and traffic hazards would begin, route through, and end in the neighborhood the remedy seeks to “protect.”
• With a hypothetical distance of 100 miles to the project landfill and 7.5 miles of diesel burned per mile driven, the transportation aspect of the undertaking alone consumes over 15,500 gallons of fuel.
• The excavated soil is delivered to a landfill, and the contamination is neither reduced in concentration nor rendered inert.

Or consider a more subtle example—a gas station with a leaking underground tank. It is not uncommon for leaking tank cases to continue for a decade before receiving agency closure. A typical site is investigated, receives some measure of physical remediation, then, due to the fact that it’s nearly impossible to remove all traces of the spilled fuel, undergoes years of extended monitoring. Thousands of gallons of gasoline are consumed by project vehicles and equipment; thousands of cubic feet of natural gas are burned by an incinerator (during soil vapor extraction projects); innumerable watts of electricity are consumed by the computers, labs and electric lights per project. Multiply this by the number of active leaking tank remediation projects and the magnitude of resource consumption is staggering.

Modify the Approach
As these examples point out, human endeavors to solve created environmental problems are often in themselves damaging to what they intend to protect. Costs associated with natural resource consumption and emissions generation, physical hazards to neighboring residents, and opportunity costs have so far been relegated to the realm of externality— costs not factored into the cost-benefit analysis. To maximize our intention to be truly protective this approach must be modified.

This is in no way meaning to indict environmental regulation; such regulation is an essential and necessary component of civilized society, as market forces alone cannot adequately protect human health and the non-human environment from the consequences of chemical releases and industrial contamination. But the objective is that the remedies first do no harm, and that considerations of net environmental benefit are incorporated into the overall decision-making process.

The concept of Net Environmental Benefit Analysis (NEBA) is not new. First introduced in the 1990s as a tool to aid oil spill response action selection, the NEBA process accounts for the negative attributes of a remedial undertaking and factors these attributes into the larger action-evaluation process. Curiously, however, NEBA has not been received by a larger audience. Given all we’ve learned, there is no better time than the present to add NEBA to the broader regulatory framework. Recognizing that change is sometimes hard, sometimes opposed by those with special interests at stake. But the benefits from NEBA in a broad environmental remediation context are overwhelming.

Markus B. Niebanck, PG, is principal and founder of Amicus, Strategic Environmental Consulting.