Management of Contaminated Sites and Land in Central and Eastern Europe

Introduction

The present report has been elaborated as part of the preparatory work for the 4^th meeting of the Ad Hoc International Working Group on Contaminated Land. The meeting was held in Copenhagen in June 1999 organised in co-operation between Denmark and Switzerland. The aim of the present report is to provide a set of summary data sheets, describing management of contaminated sites and land in a number of Eastern European and former Soviet Union countries. The report includes data on the countries shown in the table below.

During the meeting of the Ad Hoc International Working Group on Contaminated Land held in Amsterdam, the group expressed a wish also to include countries from Central and Eastern Europe into the group activities. Aiming at this, Switzerland with support from Denmark invited some 20 CEE countries to an informal working group meeting, which was held in Warsaw on September 17-18, 1998. Among others, the aim of the Warsaw meeting was to gather information on the contaminated land situation in the respective countries.

The initial work on the present report was based partly on the information resulting from the Warsaw meeting and collected by Switzerland in a meeting report /1/. This information supplemented by data collected from various other sources formed the basis for elaboration of a set of preliminary data sheets.

Each of the preliminary data sheets was distributed to the Ad Hoc Group contact persons in the countries in question for commenting and supply of additional data. The comments and additional data collected also by dialogue with the contact persons - among others at the Ad Hoc Group meeting in Copenhagen - were then used to revise the data sheets thus forming the data of the present final report.

The Danish EPA has funded the work on the editing of the data sheet information, which has been performed by RAMBØLL. Also, the EEA and the ETC/S, which have provided for assistance on the data collection performed by the Austrian EPA, have supported the work.

Reference

/1/ Ad Hoc International Working Group on Contaminated Land (1998). Ad Hoc CEE Forum on Contaminated Land. Report of the Warsaw Meeting, September 18, 1998. Report from the Swiss Agency for the Environment, Forests and Landscape.