Green Future – An Optimized Simply Designed Approach to the Soil Status Monitoring for the Purposes of Baseline Report Preparation

Abstract: Industrial Emission Directive, as the most important EU instrument for regulating pollutants emissions from industrial installations, requires among others also preparation of a baseline report as precondition to granting an environmental permit. Baseline report is an information on the state of soil and groundwater contamination by relevant hazardous substances and at the same time a practical tool that permits a quantified comparison between the state of the site described in that report and the state of the site upon definitive cessation of activities. In this paper, we briefly present an optimized simply designed approach to the soil status monitoring for the purposes of baseline report preparation according to the Slovenian legislation. Particular emphasis is given to the presentation of the methodology for the determination of the variability, which comprises a heterogeneity of sampling area and uncertainty of analytical methods. The presented approach we used in several commercial studies. The received operators’ feedback information have fully confirmed that the presented approach to the soil status monitoring ensures high quality information of baseline soil status and regulatory compliance within acceptable cost budget.