Environmental Engineering Editing and Proofreading Services

Contaminated land projects go wrong at the end. Money has been spent, soil has been moved, and the question arrives that nobody settled at the start: is it clean now? Without a written answer agreed in advance, that question is decided by whoever is least willing to sign — usually a regulator or a purchaser's consultant — and the cost of the last ten per cent of a remediation can exceed the first ninety.

We edit what environmental engineers and remediation specialists produce — remediation strategies and options appraisals, remediation objectives and endpoint criteria documents, conceptual site models and pollutant linkage descriptions, risk assessments and generic assessment criteria justifications, verification plans and verification reports, materials management plans and waste classification documentation, discharge and permit applications, monitoring programmes and compliance reports, groundwater and gas monitoring interpretations, treatment system design and performance documentation, regulator correspondence and position statements, and long-term monitoring and maintenance plans. Our editors work on the document that defines when the job is finished.

Endpoint criteria are the most valuable paragraphs in a remediation strategy and the ones most often written as intentions. "The site will be remediated to a standard suitable for the proposed residential end use" is agreeable to everyone at the start and settles nothing at the end. We write these so each criterion is a stated concentration, in a named medium, measured by a specified method, applied at a defined location and depth, with the statistical test that will be used — the mean of what, or every single sample, because those two produce different sites and different bills; so the criterion is tied to the pollutant linkage it breaks rather than floating free, since a number without its receptor cannot be renegotiated when the end use changes; so the verification sampling design is fixed in advance with its density and pattern, given that a sampling plan written after the excavation is a plan written to the result; so what happens if a criterion is not met is specified before anyone is under pressure — further excavation, a cover system, a revised assessment; and so criteria for materials retained on site are set alongside those for the ground, as reused material is where verification most often unravels. Strategies written this way end.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including site data, client information and regulator correspondence. We are editors rather than environmental engineers or contaminated land specialists, and we offer no view on criteria, risk assessment or remediation. What we can do is make the finish line something two parties can both recognise.