General information about the project

Acronym: INCORE

Project No: EVK1-CT-1999-00017

Program: EESD

Competition No: EEDS-ENV-99-1

Key action: IV.1 - Sustainable management and quality of water

Type of project: RTD

Status: ongoing project (01.04.00 – 31.03.03)

Project duration: 3 years

Co-ordinator: Dr. Thomas Ertel, Umweltwirtschaft Stuttgart, Friolzheimer Strasse 3, 70499 STUTTGART - GERMANY

1. Landeshauptstadt Stuttgart, Amt fü r Umweltschutz, 70161, Gaisburgstrasse 4, 70182 STUTTGART – GERMANY

2. Eberhard-Karls-Universitä t Tü bingen, Wilhelmstrasse 7, 72074, TÜ BINGEN - GERMANY

3. Umweltbundesamt Wien, Spittelauer Lä nde 5, 1090 WIEDEŃ - AUSTRIA

4. Communaute Urbaine de Strasbourg, 1049/1050F, Place de l’Etoile 1, 67070 STRASBOURG – FRANCE

5. Bureau de Recherches Gé ologiques et Minié res, 6009, Avenue Claude Guillemin 3, 45060 ORLEANS, 2 – FRANCE

6. Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg 1, Rue Blaise Pascal 4, 67070 STRASBOURG – FRANCE

7. Comune di Milano, Piazza della Scala 2, 20121 MILANO - ITALY

8. Politechnico of Milan, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133 MILANO – ITALY

9. Institute for Ecology of Industrial Areas, 6 Kossutha Street, 40-833 KATOWICE - POLAND

Groundwater pollution in industrialized sites is a general problem in a variety of European cities. Most of them are located in river basins and use groundwater for water supply from local shallow aquifer systems.

Within the last decades changes in land use and ownership have resulted in complex contamination patterns, such as heterogeneous distribution of contaminants, different contaminants and large subsurface areas. Industrial development and the need for groundwater conservation are in acute conflict.

Today, large amounts of private and public money are spent to identify and assess point sources of contamination without being able to reliably quantify their impact on the groundwater quality; numerous remediation schemes are operated without an economical evaluation of their long-term performance. Furthermore, remediation targets often are not clearly defined and do not necessarily include aspects of future land use. Throughout Europe numerous guidelines and directives exist at the national level, focussing on the characterisation and evaluation of individual sites - but none of the approaches is applicable to industrial regions as a whole.

INCORE aims at providing a cost-efficient technical-administrative set of tools to optimise investigation, evaluation and management of contaminated groundwater and land in urban industrial areas, considering regional aspects such as complex land-use patterns, land-use specific contamination and the extent of urban industrial areas. This will allow the revitalisation of groundwater resources and soil in these areas. Innovation of current scientific, technical, economic and administrative methodologies will be tackled.

Four European cities, which share the same groundwater problems within their industrialised urban areas, have committed themselves to jointly develop such a set of tools. At the same time there is a wide-spread variation of specific local conditions which provide a representative range to be expected at EU scale.

INCORE project outcomes shall offer market opportunities for developers, scientists and consultants through:

• Training seminars and workshops organized by the consortium for potential users

• Direct (site specific) advice offered by consultants

• Technical services rendered by developers, consultants and local partners

• Turn-key applications offered by the consortium and local partners

• Development of strategic co-operation with other developers and service providers which could help disseminate technical solutions at other locations in and outside Europe.

The work programme can be summarised in three main groups, which are investigation, assessment and revitalisation. Based on the idea of emission oriented integral investigation, an innovative cyclic approach is being proposed (cycle I to III), which starts with groundwater plume screening at the whole industrial area and ends with remediation of individual contamination source or the containment of plumes. The major advantage of this approach is that the number of areas to be considered for further investigation and remediation is reduced from one cycle to the next with a high level of investigation certainty. Consequently, a large, potentially contaminated area is screened but only a small area may be ultimately remediated.

Costs of environmental clean up activities in the European Community, which are economically justifiable, are estimated for 750-1.000 million euro annually. It is expected that the project outcomes will allow reducing these costs at all phases of the revitalisation process by 500 million euro. Economic impact of revitalization process is expected by providing incentives for new business settlements.

Public authorities will be given a chance to solve environmental problems, improve the quality of life in urban areas and sustainable develop their cities.

IETU’s role in the implementation of the project

Polish partner is responsible for ecological and health risk assessment resulting from groundwater contamination, which includes general risk assessment of the investigated areas, evaluation of various groundwater remediation methods and determining risk-based concentrations of indicator chemicals in groundwater. The assessment will enable to choose the most effective groundwater remediation method, taking into consideration the possibility of natural remediation process.

Additional information: www.umweltwirtschaft-uw.de/incore

Contact person at IETU:

Dr Jadwiga Gzyl
Institute for Ecology of Industrial Areas
6, Kossutha St.
40-833 Katowice, Poland
Phone: +48-32-254 60-31 ext. 141
fax: +48-32-254 17-17
e-mail: gzyl@ietu.katowice.pl  

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Last modification: 2002-06-21