Methodologies for compiling national inventories of contaminated sites and conducting preliminary site screening

Procedures for compiling a national inventory of contaminated sites must take into account the technical state-of-the-art in the area of subsurface contamination and restoration, the national and supranational regulatory environment, as well as the national administrative infrastructure. Within this framework, this paper proposes a methodology of building a national inventory of potentially contaminated sites, which is based on activities of environmental relevance to the subsurface, i.e. soil and groundwater. As a next step, a screening system was developed, capable of estimating pollution potential of each site, for variable amount of available site-specific data. Depending on the nature of site data (actual or estimated) and the screening outcome, a site can be (i) delisted, (ii) assigned to an inactive list of potentially contaminated sites (iii) recommended for further desktop study and site visit or, (iv) recommended for both further study and in situ sampling. The advantage of the proposed approach is the identification of potentially contaminated sites on the basis of financial records linking activities with enterprises, which are more readily accessible compared with environmental records. The feasibility of transitioning from activities to sites has been demonstrated elsewhere. The present paper describes how data gaps are addressed by the site screening methodology with the aid of an application to a randomly selected real site in Greece.