A Superfund cleanup project is, of course, an exercise in "greening" the environment, in that the remediation project is designed to remove contamination from the environment and return the affected property to beneficial use. With the February 2012 publication of EPA's "Methodology for Understanding and Reducing a Project's Environmental Footprint" report, EPA has begun to formalize a process for ensuring that the remediation itself is done as greenly as possible.

The methodology describes a total of 21 metrics by which the greenness of a cleanup can be measured across five core elements: air, water, energy, materials and waste, and land/ecosystems. The report contains planning checklists (warranted to be "user-friendly") and a series of spreadsheets (which are assuredly not user-friendly) illustrating formats for organizing raw data and quantifying impact estimates.

While the methodology will primarily be applied to future remediation projects, the techniques are already being tested at a few ongoing remediation sites that have "volunteered" to pilot the methodology. For example, at one site in the Midwest that is in the middle of long-term groundwater pump-and-treat, an EPA consultant examined the project to determine whether the carbon emissions associated with the electricity (generated by the local utility at a coal-burning power plant) needed to run the pumps and associated air strippers could be reduced.

No word yet on whether the next level of meta-analysis will require investigating how to minimize the resources used to analyze the footprint “greenity” of the underlying project itself.

American College of Environmental Lawyers, The ACOEL, is a professionalassociation of lawyers distinguished by experience and high standards in the practice of environmental law, ethics, and the development of environmental law.