Romania’s strategy for the management of contaminated sites

Like many countries, Romania shares the challenge of dealing with the legacy of past industrial activities. A uniform and cost-effective approach to investigating and cleaning up contaminated sites is one way to address the environmental and health issues. Therefore, the Romanian Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development (MESD) decided to develop a national strategy to manage such sites. With World Bank finance in place, Royal Haskoning was selected to manage the project.

In the first phase of the project an assessment of the situation in Romania regarding the legal framework, the institutional setting and the methodology for contaminated sites was made. Based on this, as well as the existing strategies in EU countries, an outline for the Romanian strategy was drafted and agreed. This outline enabled the development of the national strategy, which consists of three main components: legal and institutional, methodology and technical guidelines, and national inventory.

It was clear from work in other countries that the management of contaminated sites is an enormous operation and needs to be firmly embedded in the institutional framework to be effective. So a review of Romanian environmental legislation was carried out, with proposals prepared to bring in line with the agreed national strategy. The chosen methodology was then selected from a number of options in consultation with the ministry and the National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA). The responsible Director of MESD was very positive about what they received: “We appreciate the ‘National Strategy for Contaminated Sites Management’ and its approach to the current situation of contaminated sites in Romania through management at community level."

“We started with a rough model for the methodology, from inventory to completion of corrective actions,” says Sjacco de Vos, project manager for Royal Haskoning. “This was then developed in detail and the necessary technical guidelines were drafted. These contain standards and detailed instructions on investigations, risk assessments and corrective action planning. We also prepared a compendium on remediation and drilling techniques which can be used by the Romanian authorities.”

In order to enable the completion of a nationwide inventory of contaminated sites, an intranet-based inventory system was created which local environmental protection agencies are able to manage. The system enables a preliminary assessment of potentially contaminated sites and helps the environmental authorities to prioritise sites and invest in those that need urgent attention.

Working in collaboration
This project is the result of cooperation between the government, its agencies and the project team. Also, the presence of Royal Haskoning’s permanent office in Bucharest and its experienced environmental experts contributed to a successful implementation.

The results of the project were presented at an international three-day seminar in Bucharest which was organised in cooperation with a government-to-government project between The Netherlands and Romania.

Ton Honders of the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment works on the Soil+ programme that addresses soil quality management. He considered the seminar a positive start to the Romanian government’s implementation of its national strategy for managing contaminated sites: “This process is strengthened by the long-term experiences of the Dutch government regarding site remediation and sustainable land management. In the near future the Netherlands Soil Partnership will also make their skills and capabilities available to the Romanian government.”

Contact: Sjacco de Vos
+40 21 31 68 359
s.devos@royalhaskoning.com

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