Ministry of Economic Affairs Baden-Württemberg |
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Jürgen Braun, PhD, Research Facility for Subsurface Remediation, VEGAS, Universität Stuttgart
Soils are the habitat of plants and other organisms and play a vital role in the regulation of the water cycle. As a finite resource, they are threatened by the increasing demands of housing, industry, and traffic. During the 2nd half of the last century, land used for settlements and traffic in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg doubled. Nearly half of this area has been sealed, preventing water from infiltrating and resulting in the medium and long term in negative effects on the water cycle. Simultaneously, the number of contaminated brownfields that require costly and time-consuming remediation increased dramatically.
The successful revitalization of contaminated brownfields as residential, industrial or traffic areas poses a great challenge. It requires an optimization of planning and administrative aspects as well as the development of integrated, user-oriented site-investigation and assessment strategies. With these strategies as well as economic, ecological and social aspects in mind, containment or remediation technologies need to be developed.
For the last 20 years, the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg has been actively engaged in the systematic survey and revitalization of brownfields. Material, handbooks and guidelines published by the Landesanstalt fuer Umweltschutz, LfU (environmental protection agency of the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg) have set national and international standards.
Specific state funding programs support the universities in Tuebingen, Stuttgart (including the Research Facility for Subsurface Remediation, VEGAS), and Karlsruhe in their research into and development of innovative remediation technologies.
In order to test the effectiveness of these new technologies, model sites have been established to demonstrate site investigation and remediation technologies on a pilot scale. Utilizing a close cooperation between universities, consultant and remediation companies, regulating agencies and analytical laboratories, the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg ensures an efficient transfer of technologies and thus attains a very high standard nationally and internationally.
World-wide cooperations of companies and universities in Baden-Wuerttemberg in the framework of bi- and multilateral research projects as well as international patents ensure a national and international transfer of know-how.
Hence, research funding provided by the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg ensures the leading position of both the state and the federal republic in exporting technologies and engineering know-how in the environmental sector.
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