Unternavigation

Fundamental approach

The costs of tackling contaminated site issues in an unsystematic way can easily escalate. To avoid this problem, it is advisable to proceed according to the scheme described below.

Remediation need not always take place immediately: quite a number of budgets, even for remediation, have been subject to unnecessary strain or even exceeded due to precipitate, premature action. With the exception of situations where immediate action is obviously necessary (oil spills, acute risk to drinking water), risk assessment of a site must always come first. As a rule, a step-by-step approach is adopted, with each successive step only taking place where it is deemed necessary on the basis of information yielded by the prior step. It is thus possible to determine in an efficient and reasonable way whether the site is polluted or needs to be monitored or even cleaned up, or whether in fact no further action is required.