Monetization coupled with Life Cycle Assessment compared to Cost Benefit Analysis: a site remediation case study

Site contamination is a global concern because of the potential risks for human health and ecosystem quality. In Europe alone there are 340 000 potentially contaminated sites and this number is forecasted to increase even more by 2025. The huge amount of contaminated sites that will have to be remediated in the coming years has increased the attention for the secondary environmental impacts (i.e. the environmental impacts caused by the site remediation activities themselves) of the remediation. These secondary environmental impacts are also an aspect of the more holistic 'sustainable remediation' framework. Every contaminated site has its own specific characteristics and the large range of potential contaminants, as well as the recent focus on sustainable remediation, resulted in new developments, and stimulated technological innovations. The increased availability and efficiency of techniques makes the final choice of remediation alternative increasingly complicated. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) can support site owners and remediation companies in the choice between remediation alternatives, taking into account their secondary environmental impacts. LCA as such has also been used on several case studies to compare the secondary environmental impact of different alternatives but has been critiqued for being too complicated, time consuming, and data demanding. This paper shows how, by following the ISO 14 000, 14 040 and 14 044 guidelines initially drafted for the development of a consequential LCA, an attributional study of the environmental impacts of a site remediation case study can be done more efficiently. The case study used for this purpose entails the soil and groundwater remediation of a tar, poly-aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and cyanide contamination of a school ground by a former gas plant. The remediation alternative chosen in this case study, after a cost and preliminary soil analysis, is excavation with off-site thermal treatment of the contaminated soil. The attributional LCIA is based on the data from the site remediation project, , and modeled by using the Ecoinvent 3 database in SimaPro 8.2.0.0. Secondly a societal Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) is performed on the same case study using the same data sources. The outcome of this 'traditional' CBA is critically compared to the outcome of different monetization methods, namely Stepwise 2006, Eco-cost, Ecovalue and Benefit transfer method which use the outcome of an LCA to calculate the monetary