CL:AIRE is delighted to announce that its Technology and Research Group (TRG) has a new member - Brian Reid, Professor of Soil Science at the University of East Anglia.

CL:AIRE has now published the 2024 Technology and Research Group (TRG) Annual Report and it is available to download.

A joint advice note has been published for the nuclear sector titled Regulatory expectations for successful land quality management at nuclear licensed sites. It was issued in October 2024 by the Office for Nuclear Regulation, the Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency. The note sets out their shared, high-level regulatory expectations for the prevention and management of radioactive and non-radioactive contamination of the ground and water on nuclear licensed sites.

The UK Government has announced the delay of digital waste tracking becoming mandatory in April 2025. It will now be introduced from April 2026. Read the updated policy paper here.

The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) has recently published sector guidance documents: Construction materials and Engineering, construction and real estate. In addition, TNFD is consulting on a sector guide - Water utilities and services, and the consultation closes on 4 April 2025.  All documents are available to download and access here.

TNFD has also launched a knowledge hub for companies to upskill and take TNFD into their organisations and are running pilots on transition plans, data and state of nature data metrics.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Toxics and Human Rights has issued a call for input to its thematic report on military activities and toxics. Topics covered are wide ranging including contaminated military sites, as well as areas where armed conflict has taken place, and the use of munitions, Agent Orange, chemical weapon agents, other conflict-related pollution etc. Further information is available here.

The Special Rapporteur invites all stakeholders interested in issues relating to military activities and toxics to provide input for the preparation of the thematic report. Contributions may be country-specific, general or academic in nature. The deadline is 1 April 2025. 

EiCLaR (Enhanced and Innovative In Situ Biotechnologies for Contaminated Land Remediation) was a project funded by the EU and China. It ran from January 2021 until the end of 2024 and was composed of 13 EU and 5 Chinese partners. The broad goal of EiCLaR was to enhance performance levels through fusion of different in situ bioremediation technologies with non-biological processes and to expand the range of applications to industrial sites that contain complex, high concentration pollutant mixtures. A whole host of project outputs have been produced, aimed at different stakeholders. These range from technical bulletins, a decision support tool and white papers for an end-user audience, to an animation, podcasts and an education pack for a more general audience. These outputs are summarised on CL:AIRE's EiCLaR project page.