It's a dirty business

Tamar Wilner, Regeneration & Renewal, 10 October 2008

Decontaminators: Cameron and McIntosh in Ayrshire

If it comes off, the regeneration of the former explosives factory on Scotland's Ardeer Peninsula in North Ayrshire will be a rare, good thing. It's a massive project, at 570ha, and involves the remediation of land formerly occupied by an explosive factory. But more unusually, the mixed-use scheme is to be bankrolled entirely by the private sector.

Project manager Arran Cameron says developer NPL Estates can use this financial model, so unusual for contaminated land, because the site is so vast and can accommodate a range of uses. Many other schemes aren't so lucky, he says. "If you have a smaller site of 50-100 acres, you may only want to propose one use, and if that's isn't a high return element, (costs) would be prohibitive."

Unfortunately for regeneration practitioners, many of the country's brownfield sites are small. And it is not just a lack of economies of scale standing in the way of their reuse. Those in the remediation industry say cumbersome regulations and stingy tax relief are slowing down the rate at which contaminated land is developed. In a poll by trade body the Environmental Industries Commission (EIC) this year, 90 per cent of remediation professionals surveyed said the Government is not doing enough to support sustainable decontamination. We spoke to a number of remediation practitioners and identified a list of issues that must be resolved before contaminated sites' potential can be realised.

Tax and spend

First, a bit of history. Until recently, land remediation specialists did not have to pay any landfill tax when they disposed of contaminated soils. But the Government argued that this exemption encouraged remediators to take the easy "dig and dump" route, rather than following the more sustainable option of cleaning and reusing the soil. Consequently, it announced it would end the exemption. But to stem worries that this would spell the end for the regeneration of contaminated sites, the Government promised that the money it received would be reinvested through an expansion of existing tax rebates for remediation.

Marc Davies, regional director for the North at remediation specialist White Young Green, says the Government isn't living up to its promise. The rebate expansions will be limited, he says. "The net revenue that (the rebate expansions) will generate will be quite a lot less than landfill tax will remove," he says. He adds that dig and dump is the main remediation technique in the UK. "But some material is very difficult to treat, particularly when you get a mix of contaminants," he says.

EIC director Merlin Hyman was glad to see the Government expand the remediation activities for which tax rebates are available to include clearing underground structures and removing Japanese knotweed. But the rebate definitions are still too restrictive, he says.

For example, a site must have become derelict since 1998 to qualify, and sites that get public grants are ineligible, he says. "Most sites that have been derelict for at least ten years probably need a grant," Hyman adds. And Joanne Kwan, research manager for contaminated land at building industry research body Ciria, says that, while remediators immediately felt the cash benefit of exemption from the landfill tax, rebates take months to hit the bank account.

Feeling the crunch

Those wallet squeezes would have been hard enough for brownfield developers, but the economic slowdown has made things even tougher. The credit crunch and gasping property market have hit this area of regeneration as they have all others. Davies says the slowdown on housebuilding has also had an effect on decontamination work. "Quite a lot of the sites developers were involved with had an industrial past," he says. "That's really been halted, and quite rapidly, in some areas." Gene Wilson, group technical director at remediation company Augean, says the market downturn has made it even more crucial that the Government extends remediation tax relief.

The downturn is also taking a bite out of public finances. As reported by Regeneration & Renewal this summer, dwindling returns on property have reduced revenue at national regeneration agency English Partnerships (EP) by £30 million (R&R, 1 August, p1). One of the areas taking a hit is the agency's pilot for creating local brownfield strategies, says EP remediation adviser Richard Boyle. A centrepiece of the agency's national brownfield strategy, which was approved by the Government earlier this year, the one-year pilot was meant to work with 78 local authorities to identify the brownfield sites of greatest priority. Now its £1 million budget has been spread over two years, meaning 35 councils will get assistance this year, but the others will have to wait. Boyle argues, however, that "it won't impact too much on how we'd be delivering sites" because the agency had always intended for most development in those areas to take place only after the strategies were completed - a lengthy process in which a delay of 12 months is negligible.

Regulatory reform

Something that does slow remediators down, however, is regulation. There are two aspects to the regulatory framework for contaminated land, Hyman explains. "One is a question of how you decide whether something needs cleaning up. Then, once you've decided you are going to clean it up, you need to regulate that process because it's potentially a polluting activity." Every brownfield land transaction involves an assessment of whether the land is contaminated. And until recently, Hyman says, contamination limits have been set at conservative levels. In some cases they're below what can be detected, he says.

"In other words, things are defined as contaminated and possibly cleaned up that don't pose a real risk to human health," Hyman says. "It doesn't make environmental sense to clear them up, because that uses energy and creates waste. And when the market is struggling, it can be the final nail in the coffin (for remediation projects)."

The Government has promised to reform the regulations, and has abolished the old set of contamination limits - but has not yet brought in a new set. In the meantime, it's asking councils to decide for themselves what levels of contamination they're willing to accept. That will lead to still more conservative decision-making, Hyman says, especially because councils lack the skills related to brownfield redevelopment, and the council officers making such decisions are often quite junior. Wilson says: "There is still a lack of clarity regarding overprescriptive standards for remediation."

But Boyle argues that the new government approach "removes several layers of over-conservativeness" while providing a toolkit that will enable councils to produce their own numbers. He says he doesn't see the lack of prescribed figures setting out permissible contamination levels as a huge problem. "Councils can go generate their own numbers," he says. But he acknowledges that local authorities might end up with various sets of numbers being calculated by different clients and consultants. Government watchdog the Environment Agency has said it will publish maximum permissible levels for 14 contaminants by next March.

Legal hurdles

A further regulatory problem is the European Union's definition of waste, which, for some time, has included contaminated soil. "That has presented quite a few legislative hurdles," Davies says. Unfortunately, the hurdles stand in the way of the more environmentally friendly remediation techniques that the Government wants to encourage with its landfill tax on "dig and dump".

Put simply, contaminated soil is considered as waste by the EU - even after it has been treated. This creates regulatory barriers, such as the need to get an exemption from waste management licensing rules for treated soil.

Fortunately, a new code of practice looks set to resolve some of these issues. The guidance - released last month by research body Contaminated Land: Applications in Real Environments (Cl:aire) and written jointly with the Environment Agency - essentially says that remediators don't have to treat decontaminated soils as waste, provided they meet certain conditions such as establishing a tracking system for the material. "Hopefully it will be a key mechanism to overcoming this barrier," Davies says.

Using the planning system

A final hurdle looks less likely to be overcome in the near future. That has to do with the priority given to brownfield sites in the planning system - a key to enabling costly remediation work, practitioners stress. But some parts of the UK benefit from sharper brownfield development incentives than others.

NPL's Cameron says: "In Scotland, we're certainly behind England". In England, a government target states that 60 per cent of new homes should be built on brownfield land, whereas in Scotland the numbers are only advisory - a "token tip of the cap", Cameron says. He argues that firm targets should be included in guidance such as Scotland's national planning framework.

Overall, the remediators say, there are signs of progress - especially Cl:aire's guidance on waste legislation - but much more remains to be done. And, they say, it's mostly down to the Government. Its challenge: to derisk a risky proposition in a difficult market.

DECONTAMINATION TECHNIQUES: THE STEAM CLEAN

Park Mews, Ecclesfield, Sheffield

Sheffield City Council initially refused to grant developer Taylor Wimpey permission to build 105 homes on this former Stanley Tools factory site because it wanted to retain the land for employment uses. The developer appealed and won permission several years later.

Then the real work began, according to Mark Hadfield, the technical director at Taylor Wimpey. "It was a pretty contaminated site," he says. Factory work had included dipping forged hammer heads into mineral oil, which then spilled, sunk into the ground and contaminated the water table. Making the site suitable for homes meant it had to cleaned to a higher standard than would have been the case if it was to be used for offices or factories. Hadfield says the usual techniques in this scenario would have been "dig and dump" or bioremediation.

But Taylor Wimpey decided to try something else: a process called six-phase heating. This is used frequently in Europe but is relatively new to the UK, Hadfield says. The process involves drilling holes into the ground and filling them with water. The water is then boiled and the contaminants escape in the steam, which is collected and passed through filters. Clean water comes out the other side.

The technique worked brilliantly, Hadfield says - until the remediator discovered tar in the ground, which hadn't been noticed before. The boiling process had liquefied the tar and contaminated the groundwater again. The tar then had to be sucked out through the holes in the ground. "It was still the most effective solution. It just delayed the project by a few weeks," says Hadfield.

He says this method has higher initial costs, but it saved money in the end. When less soil is dug out of the ground, house foundations don't have to be as deep. "In this project, that was a significant saving," he says.

DECONTAMINATION TECHNIQUES: BACTERIAL WARFARE

Dinnington Colliery, Rotherham

This 85ha site, formerly host to a colliery, coking works and brickyards, is in one of England's most deprived areas, so the council and regional development agency Yorkshire Forward were keen to see it used to generate jobs.

According to Ian Bramley of Yorkshire Forward, formerly head of property and coalfields at economic regeneration company Renaissance South Yorkshire, the coking operations left the site with a nasty mix of toxic compounds. The development partners chose not to landfill the soil because "we didn't like the idea of just moving a problem to another site", Bramley says. Instead, they used bioremediation, in which bacteria are introduced to digest the contaminants. It is not always cost effective, Bramley warns, but it worked on this large site because a large volume of soil had to be treated.

Remediators also had to deal with piles of excavated rock left over from the mining. These contained naturally occurring, but dangerous, elements called heavy metals. The rock was buried and covered with impermeable material, then clean soil, and the soil was planted to create a park. Employers have now moved into industrial buildings (above) that form the first completed phase of the project.

Bramley says it costs less to clean up a site for a commercial use than for housing. "If you were remediating a heavily contaminated site for housing, the clean-up standards would be higher," he says. But, even with falling house prices, housing still sells for more per square metre than office or industrial space. "On this site, cost exceeded value, so it had to be done by the public sector," he says of Dinnington, a recipient of cash from EP's National Coalfields Programme. "However, if you're building a mix of leisure, retail and housing, where end values can exceed the cost of reclamation, the private sector would be interested."