Quantitative Sustainability Assessment of Various Remediation Alternatives for Contaminated Lake Sediments: Case Study

Various technologies have been developed for the remediation of environmentally contaminated sites. The prime goal of remediation technologies is to identify and reduce the contaminants to risk-based allowable concentrations. For a particular problem of contamination, multiple remediation technologies may be feasible. Choosing the most sustainable option among many available technologies is challenging. Generally, the selection of remediation technology is solely based on the cost and time frame of the project. Hence, the environmental impacts as well as the social impacts associated with the project is usually overlooked. In recent years, decision making has become more holistic with the introduction of triple bottom line sustainability assessment framework. It accounts for the environmental, economic and social impacts of the project. In this article, a case study is presented which involves triple bottom line sustainability assessment as well as the integration of the three pillars of sustainability to obtain overall sustainability index for the comparison of various remediation alternatives and arrive at the most sustainable option. This study presents the sustainability assessment framework and its application to select the most sustainable remediation method for contaminated sediments at a site.