The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental cleanup or remediation as a series of cleanup activities that are undertaken to take care of the safe handling of potentially hazardous material or material that may threaten human health and/or the environment. In designing remediation activities for a site, then, it is critical to recognize the past history and potential impact that various compounds may have had during industrial operation, as these activities may have altered the soil, water and/or air in the area. Since absolute remediation to restore a site to its pristine state is often technically and economically unfeasible, countries with more experience in industrial site remediation – such as the United States, Canada, Italy and the Netherlands – rely on risk-based remediation. The risk analysis methodology consists of estimating the implications of being exposed to different substances. The risk analysis can be divided into 4 stages: In case of finding areas that present a level of risk outside the acceptable range, concrete remediation activities for that area are defined. These remediation or risk mitigation activities can be of three types: the first involves removing the substance causing the risk; the second is to intervene the exposure pathway, i.e. the channel through which the substance reaches the receptor, for example, by placing clean soil, ventilation or sealing; or, finally, to limit the final use of the area, not allowing, for example, the use of the soil as agricultural production land. It is important to understand that remediation and risk analysis is a widely used methodology and there is vast global experience in the remediation of land that used to be dedicated to industrial activities, also known as brownfields. The key is to use this global experience, consider the local reality and approach and thus have a conservative approach, in order to ensure the safety of people’s health, the fundamental axis of this type of study. For the Salinas site, ILS is working with the multinational company Golder Associates, whose team of Chilean and foreign specialists is developing, among other studies, the risk analysis that will be presented in 2016 to the authority through an Environmental Impact Study. The above, with the main objective of guaranteeing the health of the people who live, work, recreate and circulate in the future urban project that will be developed on the site.
