Progress in the Management of Contaminated Sites in Europe

Abstract

This report presents the current state of knowledge about progress with the management of contaminated sites in Europe. It directly supports the EU Soil Thematic Strategy (COM(2006) 231), which identifies local soil contamination as an important issue. It presents facts, analyses, and methods on the management of Contaminated Sites, which can inform policy makers, professional practitioners, researchers, citizens and the media. The report is based on data that were collected from the National Reference Centres for Soil in 39 coun-tries belonging to the European Environment Information and Observation Network (EIO-NET) during a campaign organised by the JRC European Soil Data Centre in 2011-2012. The information presented in this report is based on a set of indicators which have been agreed on and used by the EIONET for more than a decade. This set of indicators contrib-utes to the Core Set Indicator “Progress in the Management of Contaminated Sites” (CSI 015) of the European Environment Agency (EEA), which is used for reporting on the State of the Environment.\n \nThese indicators aim to answer the following policy-relevant questions: What is the esti-mated extent of soil contamination? How much progress has been achieved in the manage-ment and control of local soil contamination? Which sectors contribute most to soil contami-nation? What are the main contaminants affecting soil and groundwater in and around Con-taminated Sites? How much is spent on cleaning up soil contamination? How much of the public budget is used?\n\nThe data request was sent to the then 32 EEA member countries (27 European Union Mem-ber States together with Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey) and the seven EEA cooperating countries in the West Balkan: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia , the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Montenegro, Serbia as well as Kosovo under the UN Security Council Resolution 1244/99 . 28 countries returned the questionnaire.