Human health assessment for remediation technologies (HEART): a multi-criteria decision analysis tool

Government of Canada has identified over 22,000 contaminated sites across Canada. Custodians are responsible to manage environmental risks of their sites to human health and the environment (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat in Federal Contaminated Sites Inventory, 2015 ) from identifying the contaminants to choosing an optimal remediation technology. Remediation technologies—apart from their initial goal to minimize risk—can have negative impacts on human health; hence, custodians need a tool that helps them manage human health risks of available remediation technologies. Although existing tools consider various criteria (environmental and socio-economic), a tool that specifically evaluates human health risks of remediation technologies may be missing; therefore this study proposes and designs human health assessment for remediation technologies (HEART) and presents a practical example with site-data. HEART estimates human health risks (cancer and non-cancer) associated with remediation techniques and combines them into a single score to help address exposure and human health risks and fulfill custodian need to select and evaluate remedial technologies.