"Nowadays
few people wouldn't agree that we should be careful with the world we
live in and that environmental legislation is the only way to guarantee
that we are. The rules and regulations, however, should be realistic,
based on sound arguments and real-world data and not on assumptions and
theoretical and sometimes even idealistic models.
In
the early years, however, regulators have in certain cases been
overzealous and have overshot their mark by issuing too many rules and
too stringent regulations. The result was incomprehension and
frustration with polluters and remediators, more often than not leading
to evasive behaviour and in a few cases even to lawsuits, the very
opposite of what was originally intended.
In
a number of western countries consciousness of environmental problems
started roughly 25 years ago and the regulators had to start almost from
zero. Understandably mistakes were made, mostly because of ignorance,
but during the following decades all parties concerned i.e., regulators,
polluters and remediators, learned from these mistakes and adaptations
to existing legislation or completely new legislation followed.
Many
countries have only recently started to address their environmental
pollution problems in earnest. When setting up their rules and
regulations they took advantage of the experiences of those who started
25 years ago. In the case of ground and groundwater remediation,
however, we still encounter sometimes unrealistic clean-up values and
verification procedures."
Reinout Lageman, Director and Principal Consultant
