If you have ever thought that the CL:AIRE Definition of Waste Code of Practice (DoW CoP) would be of use on one of your remediation or construction projects, either in the EU or elsewhere, CL:AIRE has good news.
A separate international DoW CoP Declaration procedure with language to fit with projects outside of England and Wales has been prepared. We have called this a Construction Soil Passport Declaration.
The DoW CoP was originally drafted to align with the EU Waste Framework Directive in providing a means of demonstrating that in the appropriate scenario, construction site soil or other site derived material(s) could be used without the need to manage it as a waste. In England and Wales this use comes with the express support of the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales. Outside of England and Wales, the regulatory position is of course different.
There has been interest from overseas regulators on the application of DoW CoP but as yet it has not been adopted or adapted by any regulator outside England and Wales. Despite this, it has been used by project teams internationally in an 'unofficial' capacity in the past. In light of this regulator interest and at the request of several consultants and site owners, CL:AIRE has decided to make it available internationally. This is not as a direct regulatory requirement, but as a means of providing an established framework for demonstrating risk based, environmentally sustainable management of soil and other material on construction sites outside of England and Wales.
The international interest in DoW CoP comes from several angles: firstly as an established framework for material use, and secondly as a means of providing trusted and credible third party oversight for such operations, either in a construction project or in a due diligence situation where remediation forms part of a property deal, especially where multiple stakeholders are involved. To be clear, CL:AIRE is not presenting the DoW CoP as a soil health certification scheme as proposed by the European Parliament and Council in their Soil Monitoring and Resilience (Soil Monitoring Law) proposal. DoW CoP International is aimed at the construction industry and, just as in England and Wales, it is concerned with the environmentally safe management and use of material in a sustainable way.
If you are interested in the possibilities this may open up for a project, please follow the link to the DoW CoP International web page on the CL:AIRE website.