Setting Up

Setting up and planning a demonstration project involves many basic pre-requisites depending on which stakeholder group you belong. If you are not a remediation practitioner, you will need to consider the technical feasibility of a given technology and may want guidance on the selection of the most suitable technology for your problem. For this purpose the links and documents on the right may be useful.

Below are the headers which comprise the "Setting-Up" stage.

Certain site types identified can be sought by simply identifying the former pollutant mechanism and contamination type which best fits the capabilities of your technology (e.g. gas works, metal foundry, road construction, former landfill, railway sidings, agricultural spraying, fuel storage tanks etc). Web and directory searches will often locate the client which either owns, or is the guardian for theses type of sites and approaches can be made using this route. Also clients may have preferred consultants/contractors who they trust and routinely use, so presenting to potential clients with the capabilities of your technology may be worthwhile. National Agencies involved in remediation may hold this kind of organisation directories and also have knowledge of the types of contaminated sites and their guardians. Direct links to National support organizations are provided in the Table for specialist support organizations.

Confidence in remediation demonstration projects is best achieved by making sure projects are good quality, robust, and are disseminated to a wide audience. Companies regularly produce their own marketing case study summaries, however, to gain better external belief in your technology, projects which are peer reviewed, or verified, by independent parties are much more valued. Imparting confidence is intrinsically linked to good quality reporting. To have your report or demonstration peer-reviewed, either through journal publication or an appraisal scheme will help establish external credibility. An overview of reporting channels available is shown in the Table for European or national possibilities of reporting remediation demonstrations within the reporting section.

Another mechanism for gaining external credibility and trust would be through the adoption of a verification scheme. Europe does not yet have an implemented Environmental Technology Verification (ETV) scheme although one is presently being scoped by the project  PROMOTE as part of the EC’s European Environmental Technologies Action Plan ( ETAP). PROMOTE is tasked with scoping an ETV and initiating a framework for efficiency control and performance verification system for soil-groundwater protection, with an anticipated impact of faster market introduction of novel techniques, hence strengthening the competitiveness and commercialization of technology developers in Europe.

Funding demonstration projects is often the greatest limiting factor in initiating new projects. Grant funding from a funding programme, can come in various forms, often depending on how well a technology is accepted. Conditions of funding vary and in some countries are awarded prior to a remediation strategy and a chosen technology, whilst in others, rigorous details of how a technology will be applied are required and the funding may be competitive in the form of a competition. Standard project funding would typically come from the client prepared to pay for a solution to the problem on their site, and regardless of being private or public sector, are likely to procure a vendor through a tender procedure, where imparting confidence to the client will once again be a critical step. Less well established vendors at demonstration scale may wish to engage in a collaborative funding agreement where all partners put money towards the project at their own risk, to share both the benefits of a successful project and the funding burden. This is obviously a simplification of funding arrangements.

Some supporting material is given on the right.

Project partners such as consultants or specialist contractors are likely to be necessary, especially when operating in foreign regions where you may benefit from partners with local knowledge of regulatory regimes including permitting for treatment plants, and with knowledge of the planning process. Organisations listed in the Table for specialist support organizations are likely to be able to provide directories or links to potentially suitable partners.  EUGRIS, the European Portal for Soil and Water Management also has a pan-European directory of individuals and organizations in this area, for free registered users.