Sixteen-hundred registrants representing 26 nations. Sixteen sponsoring organizations and 78 exhibitors. Twelve short courses, 67 technical sessions and 384 platform presentations.

The Eighth International Conference on Remediation of Chlorinated and Recalcitrant Compounds, presented by Battelle on May 21-24 in Monterey, Calif., was a testimony to the continuing need for this kind of work “and the number of people who have passion for it,” Program Chairwoman Heather Rectanus said during her opening remarks at a plenary session Monday morning.

“Battelle’s a great conference because it’s really technically oriented,” said Beth Gentry, senior federal program manager with Brown and Caldwell, a long-term co-sponsor of the event. “With emerging contaminants, the government is looking to be proactive. They want to know what they will have to deal with in five years and start planning for it now. They need to know what remediation technologies are available.”

	Steve Koenigsberg, Brown and Caldwell Vice President, talks about the three pillars of remediation: Design, management and closure.

Cost-to-closure was a hot topic at the conference, in several technical sessions and panel discussions.

“In the past they were really focused on getting remedies in place but once the remedies were in place they still had 20-30 years of long-term monitoring, financial obligations and liability to worry about,” Gentry said. “So right now there’s a big push to actually close sites and do it in a way that takes into account not just the capital cost of the remediation but also the lifecycle cost.”

“We’ve all seen the industry change and yet in some ways it hasn’t changed,” Warner said.

		Stepping closer to closure BC remediation professionals share strategies and lessons learned for crafting a faster, more certain exit plan.

Andrea Leeson, manager of the Department of Defense’s SERDP/ESTCP R&D program, said that doesn’t imply that no progress has been made. “We are asking different questions of the scientific community to ultimately improve the way we manage our sites,” she said.

Featured speaker Joel Makower, chairman and executive editor of GreenBiz Group Inc., and creator of greenbiz.com, said environmentalism is no longer on the fringes -- today’s leading companies are integrating sustainability into their thinking and their operations. “Everyone is trying to be seen as the greener, more sustainable company,” Makower said.

Unfortunately, green stories aren’t that easy to tell. “Datapoints are useless. This is about our families, our communities, our future,” he said. “Good storytelling informs and inspires, it combines head and heart, it makes business human. At the end of the day, it’s not just about being greener, it’s about being better.”

Being green was a topic of high interest, from Makower’s keynote address to standing-room only panel discussions such as “Assessing Green and Sustainable Remediation: What Have We Accomplished and What Can We Improve Upon?”

As the focus of remediation turns from the traditional “dig and haul” to more sustainable solutions, Battelle manages to keep up.

“The conference continues to provide a broad and relevant mix of topics,” said Kenton Oma, P.E., a senior associate from BC’s Nashville office and a Battelle veteran.

Oma said the session on “Assessment and Remediation of MTBE and Other Oxygenates” was pertinent to an existing project he’s working on with tert-butyl contamination. “Groundwater plume data from multiple retail gasoline sites across the U.S. indicate that MTBE plumes, on average, have not advanced much differently than benzene and in 90 percent of the cases, these plumes are stable or shrinking,” he said. “One of our clients is now using hydrogen peroxide injections into source zones to treat TBA and is using temperature rise as a metric to monitor TBA treatment progress.”

Erik McPeek, P.E., from BC’s Columbus, Ohio, office, presented a paper on “Selection and Testing of Biowall Amendments for Effective Rejuvenation of Biowalls at High-Sulfate Sites,” which details an ongoing project with the Air Force Center for Engineering and the Environment.

“The project is unique in that it is a pilot-scale test of an approach at rejuvenating biowalls at sites with high sulfate occurring naturally in the groundwater,” McPeek said. “This particular application has not been tried before, so it is really to prove (or disprove) the theory behind this rejuvenation technique.”

He said he got some good feedback on his presentation, and he appreciates the conference as a forum to share and gather ideas for current and future work. “Battelle is a great technical conference that brings in professionals from around the world who are at the forefront of the remediation field in both the public and private sectors, as well as academia,” McPeek said.

Randy Bauer, supervising hydrologist from BC’s Phoenix office, who presented a paper “Vapor Management and Control During Chemical Oxidation,” agreed.