Israel to calculate cost of contamination

Israel is to assess the cost of cataloguing and cleaning up all of its contaminated land as part of a national remediation programme.


The Israeli government has pinpointed around 1250 sites which it believes are contaminated by fuels, oils, toxic metals and chloro-organic compounds.

Most of these pollutants are hazardous to human health and to the environment and others are known or suspected carcinogens.

The Ministry of Environmental Protection estimates that thousands more sites are contaminated in Israel.

The government has now hired one of the countries leading contaminated land specialists, LLD Advanced Technologies, to characterise the different pollutants in the soil at these sites and put a price on detailed surveying and remediation.

The work will provide the backbone of the country’s new Contaminated Lands Law, a draft of which has been out for public consultation in 2008.

It will help assess the scope of the problem and inform decision making on national priorities for the remediation of contaminated sites in Israel and in estimating the necessary budget for remediation.

The project will conduct spatial historic surveys at a national level and focused historic surveys for select sites.

It will also determine the ownership of the land in areas in which land contamination is suspected and assessing the owners’ responsibility for the pollution.

It will assess the costs of soil surveys and land remediation, including the sites designated in the spatial historic survey.

Finally, it will make an economic assessment – looking at changes in the land value between sites while contaminated and once remediated.

Sam Bond

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