Already marred in controversy, can the government's eco-towns clean up their act? B&E reports.

THEY’VE ENDURED a barrage of criticism, from allegations that the planning applications are dusted-down, eco-labeled failures, to local residents opposing the plans. Can the government’s eco-towns win people over?

If they can, then they must start from the bottom.

Fifteen short-listed locations, ranging from former MoD land and military depots to former mining pits, will need to be remediated in exemplary fashion. If the towns are to succeed with the highest environmental standards, dig and dump simply will not do.

“Only the best bids with the highest environmental standards stand a chance of being selected as an eco-town,” said housing minister Caroline Flint last month when she announced a panel of 12 experts to challenge bid proposals.

The 15 sites will be whittled down to ten in October. Developers will then be charged with submitting full planning applications with full environmental impact assessments on how they go about cleaning up the land.

And with heavy criticism already, the first new towns in the UK for nearly half a decade, will need to fire on all low carbon cylinders – starting with sustainable remediation strategies – to win over their critics.

Offsite off the menu
In the past the gripe about treating on-site has been the expense.

According to a best practice guide on soil remediation costs issued by English Partnerships (EP) in March, a high water risk contaminated site intended for residential use could range in cost anywhere between £125,000 to £1.375m a hectare to remediate.

But with the landfill tax exemption disappearing at the end of the year, and fuel prices surging, it will cause certain onsite remedies to become more competitive.

The size and timeframe given for the construction of the new towns will also play into the hands of on-site remediation, says Jane Forshaw, head of environmental policy at EP.

When EP merges with the Housing Corporation next year to form the Homes and Communities Agency it will become intrinsically involved in the delivery of the new towns.

“We are trying to push the take-up of all remediation technologies,” she says. “We have a hierarchy and bottom of the list would be dig and dump. We’d expect to see people using innovative solutions so we can move away from landfill.

“Given the span of time it takes to construct the towns, you should have time and space to look at what are often more sustainable options.”

Bioremediation is likely to be used onsites contaminated with petrol and fuel. There is also a significant opportunity for soil washing techniques to be used.

“If you’ve got hydro-carbon as a waste and if you’re cleaning that up using soil washing then you’re left with an inert, mineral rich soil,” says Forshaw. “With an eco-town you could be looking at blending that mineral rich soil with green waste compost to make a useful soil again.

Another concept Forshaw says lends itself to the eco-towns programme is a cluster concept, with which EP is working closely with the Contaminated Land: Applications in Real Environments (CL: AIRE) on.

A cluster is a group of sites affected by contamination that includes a shared ex situ decontamination capacity located at one site (the hub).

The concept lends itself to sites where the land contains insufficient volumes of contaminated material to justify the use of on-site decontamination technologies.

“An eco-town might be a hub and if you’ve got sites nearby that have got similar contaminates and they need to be repaired over a similar time frame you can move the soil physically for treatment,” she says.

End use
Aside from the environmental agenda and the national gaze, an eco-town is predominantly residential, demanding the highest level of clean up. Some of the proposals include plans for up to 15,000 new homes.

But they also include plans for schools, health centres and retail – some of which are less sensitive than residential, thus the contamination onsite will affect the master planning of the development.

Arup associate director Richard Owen heads the group’s largest specialist contaminated land team. Arup is involved in at least two of the bid proposals and Owen is just starting to get involved in one of the sites.

Owen says that it would be sensible to draw a big red line around the site, similar to how the Olympic Park is being developed in East London, and then try and treat and reuse materials within that wider site.

“One approach is to recycle soils to manufacture cover layer materials which might not be suitable within residential areas but may be suitable in harder land forms with appropriate capping materials,” he says.

A call for targets
Despite no standard set of objectives or targets set by the Department of Communities and Local Government in terms of remediation, most environmental campaigners are calling for targets for treating materials onsite.

Forshaw is keen to see innovation from developers in terms of remediation. “It would be really great if they were to push the boundaries and use innovative technologies to be exemplar.”

But Owen warns that radical standards could lead to double standards. “I think the DCLG should be setting some objectives but I don’t think they will be providing any different guidance on what would be acceptable elsewhere in the UK,” he says. “Otherwise it could lead to a double standard.”

Owen identifies one of the burgeoning challenges facing an exemplar clean up is commercial pressures.

“Contamination is usually a commercial consideration and whether there is enough money in the final land value to spend what you need to spend to treat the land and bring it to that value,” he says. “The eco-towns are a way from perhaps features that would give developers high-end value. I think there is going to be a relatively low threshold on what you can afford to spend on treating contamination to bring it into beneficial use.”

Although confident that the eco-towns will draw out some novel ways in dealing with contamination Owen says major schemes can’t rely on untested technologies.

“I’d expect to see bioremediation, complex sorting and soil washing,” he says. “Although you need the right type of soil for washing to be effective. Once you’ve got between 25% to 30% clay in the soil then you’re just going to get a huge waste residue stream that you’ve got to do something with.

“The other type of remediation I’d expect to see is more of a physical remediation in terms of clean capping layers over the surface and vertical barriers in the ground.”

Time frame
To take a large site forward Owen says you are talking between six months to a year from when you start looking at a site to when you’ve got a scheme that can be submitted for planning.

There have been murmurs from government quarters that the eco-towns will override the planning process, but Owen says this is unlikely.

“I can’t see there being any shortcuts being brought into the system,” he says. “Specifically for these ecotowns, in terms of the risk to human health and pollution risks associated with contaminated land. It won’t wash with the Environment Agency, let alone whatever the planning authority may want to do.”

However, Owen does envisage a streamlining of the signing off process in regards to remediation strategies. “I think they may set up a system where the eco-towns are each regarded as a single entity; a single point of contact and all the regulatory bodies associated with approving strategies, objectives, remediation plans and signing off of validation reports are brought together, so there is more of a set structure.”

The DCLG is currently carrying out a sustainability appraisal and sustainable remediation is one of the things it will be considering. The document will also provide a more detailed assessment of the shortlisted locations with regards to contamination.