Making Green Site Restoration Even Greener

Battelle worked with the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to develop a stand-alone tool called SiteWise™ to evaluate and quantify the environmental, health, safety and economic impact of a variety of restoration alternatives. SiteWise™ expands on existing Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) concepts to conduct GSR assessments specifically tailored to site restoration and remediation.

SiteWise™ assesses the remedy footprint of a remedial alternative/technology in terms of a consistent set of metrics, including: (1) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; (2) energy use; (3) air emissions of criteria pollutants including nitrogen oxide (NOx), sulfur oxide (SOx), and particulate matter (PM); (4) water consumption; (5) resource consumption; and (6) worker safety and accident risk. The assessment is carried out using a building-block approach where every remedial alternative is first broken down into modules that mimic the remedial phases in most remedial actions, including remedial investigations (RIs), remedial action constructions (RACs), remedial action operations (RA-Os), and long-term monitoring (LTM). Once broken down into various modules, the footprint of each module is individually calculated. The different footprints are then combined to estimate the overall footprint of the remedial alternative. This building-block approach reduces redundancy in the sustainability evaluation and facilitates the identification of specific activities that have the greatest remedy footprint.