Author(s)

J. Grima & R. García-Delgado

Abstract

The European Parliament’s mandate to the Commission to develop a thematic strategy for soil protection highlights the need to adopt measures that prevent, limit or reduce the impact of human activities on soil. In Spain, the Royal Decree 9/2005 of 14th January fulfils the provisions of the Wastes Law 10/1998 of 21st April, and establishes a list of potentially soil contaminating activities and criteria and standards for declaring that sites are contaminated, subject to prior consultation with the Autonomous Communities. The Royal Decree shall not apply to publicly owned sites where military installations are located. Within a period of two years from the date on which it enters into effect, the Ministry of Defence shall approve, subject to previous acceptance by the Ministry of the Environment, a decontamination plan for such sites. As the Ministry of Defence owns more than 1% of the whole National territory, the selection of a case study is the first step in the definition of a practical methodology for demonstration of the economic viability of the environmental remediation. It involves estimating a range of values for the potential profit that could be obtained when the site is disaffected from use and introduced into the market. Keywords: catalogue of contaminated properties, decontamination plan, defence facilities, polluting activities, soil pollution, study of economic viability. 1 Introduction The number of contaminated sites in Western Europe (Prokop et al. [1]) varies between 300,000 and 1,500,000. These figures, in themselves indicative of the seriousness of the problem, also point to the serious ecological and legal consequences that result from an absence of standardized methodologies for identifying and characterizing contaminated soils. Indeed, the extent of the difference between the two figures is due precisely to a lack of uniformity in the

Keywords

catalogue of contaminated properties, decontamination plan, defence facilities, polluting activities, soil pollution, study of economic viability.