partments due to remedial activities. The costs perspective aims at mi-

the environmental performance of the operations. These are compared 
again to the status quo. The index is here measured in Environmental 
merit Units. Finally, the costs include all expenses involved in the op-
erations, including asset costs. Costs are computed yearly for the full 
length of the operations. The Net Present Value is then used as an es-
timate of the total costs. Each cost item is the sum of the expected ex-
penses in a given period plus a safety quantity to guarantee that the 
real costs will have only a limited probability of exceeding the com-
puted costs. 
17. Прочтите и письменно переведите текст 16С 
Text 16C 
Issues in soil remediation 
Multifunctionality has proven very difficult to achieve in practice. 
About 50 per cent of the clean-up soil does not meet the multifunc-
tionaluity target and has to be used under additional constraints. 
Achieving miltifunctionality may be hampered by the cost of the 
operations and by technical and feasibility constraints. Technology for 
soil remediation is developing very quickly with a shift from radical, 
hard solutions (such as excavate-pump-and- treat) to biological tech-
niques which, for instance, exploit natural attenuation phenomena. 
However, the costs issues are still a mayor constraint to soil remedia-
tion. High costs have become both politically indefensible, and eco-
nomically unfeasible. Facing sheer expenditures, companies have of-
ten applied a wait-and-see attitude, delaying the operations as much as 
possible often exploiting the ambiguities of the guideline and the pos-
sibility of some discretionary interpretation of the law. The main issue 
raised by the private sector is that the multifunctionality objective sys-
tematically disregards efficiency and effectiveness considerations. 
Most companies do know what the future use of contaminated sites 
will be, and thus question the general principle that all sites should be 
cleaned-up to the same extent. An industrial area may need less strict 
measures than a residential one. In addition, the application of soft, 
but long, remediation techniques may significantly cut costs, although 
169

may delay the soil usage and leave many sites polluted for a consider-
able time. 
Although the cost-related matters are clear, the multifunctionality 
objective may also raise some environmental concerns. Scientists con-
sider multifunctionality as the soil-related interpretation of sustainabil-
ity. An implicit, and almost universal, assumption is that by cleaning-
up a polluted site (or rehabilitating any degraded area) there is a net 
environmental benefit. Growing evidence has been provided that sug-
gests that this assumption should be challenged and that the overall 
environmental balance of remediation may not be always positive. By 
considering the full cycle of the remediation process, it can be recog-
nized that the process requires the use of natural resources like energy 
and clean water, and may result into a transfer of pollution to other 
environments, for instance by creating air pollution, water pollution 
and waste. The soil remediation thus raises two types of environ-
mental concerns: 
1. A local, site specific concern, related to the need of reducing 
contamination below some safe level. This is clearly the positive site 
of the coin, in the sense that soil remediation provides a net local ben-
efit. 
2. A regional or even global concern, related to the need of mini-
mizing the use of scarce resources during the operations and the 
spread and transfer of pollution to other environments. These factors 
are the negative side of the remediation and cannot be disregarded in 
computing the full environmental balance of remediation. 

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