Gandalf

Construction and re-planning of urban land call for sound and adequate evaluation of potential negative health effects caused by pollution from former land use. This demands not only reliable chemical impact assessments but also cost-effective decision-making processes, to avoid unnecessary and costly delays. The chemical impact assessment of soil and sediment contamination is today restricted to measuring concentrations of target organic and element contaminants covered by national quality criteria. Ignoring the presence of other contaminants and their combination in complex mixtures limits the reliability of this approach, and can increase construction costs.

Our vision is to support sustainable economic growth of urban areas by providing a data-driven analysis tool that can be used to prioritize treatment of contaminated soil and sediment. We want to move away from the classical paradigm, where very limited sets of pre-selected indicators of potential pollutants are used to describe complex health and environmental risks at individual contaminated sites, to a paradigm where fingerprinting of entire contaminant profiles allows accurate chemical impact assessments, and where appropriate visualization tools for larger areas makes this information easily accessible.

Articles about GANDALF:

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