Ecological risk based clean-up goals for soil: A note of caution
- IT Corp., Albuquerque, NM (United States)
Establishing ecologically based clean-up goals is essential to linking the protection of the natural environment to remedial actions. A common practice is to derive preliminary remediation goals (PRGs) based on reverse hazard quotient calculations that rely on the toxicity of a specific chemical to an individual organism. Although this method has proven sufficient in the derivation of human health PRGs, it is not adequate for ecological based clean-up goals. Human health PRGs are designed to protect sensitive individuals within a population, while protection of the environment involves more than the protection of an individual organism and should provide protection to populations, communities, and ecosystems. Protection of such dynamic and complex systems is a complicated problem making the development of ecological PRGs more difficult to achieve than the development of PRGs for a more static human population. Such ecological PRGs are often conservatively calculated to be protective of all levels of ecological organization. To achieve this, uncertainty factors may be incorporated into the estimation of these PRGs, thereby reducing the values to unreasonably low concentrations that are frequently lower than background concentrations and human health PRGs. As ecological risk assessors are realizing, remediation cannot be based on PRGs not supported by fact. An example will be presented on how site-specific toxicity and residue data provide realism in the establishment of ecological clean-up goals. Comparisons will be made with ecological PRGs based on benchmark screening values and an exposure assessment with limited site specific data. Recommendations will be made to use a weight-of-evidence method in deriving ecological clean-up goals as recommended by Environment Canada.
- OSTI ID:
- 242406
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-9511137--; ISBN 1-880611-03-1
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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