What is a Brownfield?

Ottobre 3, 2009 | Eco News, Environment

It’s not often in polite conversation that the topic of Brownfields comes up, but in community development circles the concept does, if not the name.

For general purposes, a Brownfield can be defined as a piece of property formerly, but not currently, in productive use, with environmental contamination concerns that have precluded re-development. This contrasts it to "Greenfield" space, which is new, un-built ground, without concerns about environmental contamination. Yes, there are more specific definitions when you get into federal and state laws and regulations, but this is a good working definition: abandoned property with environmental concerns that have made re-development difficult.

These are not the Love Canals of the country; significant environmental problems posing an immediate threat are dealt with under Superfund, the Leaking Underground Storage Tank rules, the Clean Water Act rules, and many other state and federal statutes and regulations. But where a responsible owner is either no longer in existence, or bankrupt, and where the levels of concern are too low to obtain federal or state money for an agency-run cleanup, a property may simply sit, un-loved, blighting a neighborhood and simply by its presence inhibiting other economic projects in the vicinity.

So it’s potentially the old gas station on the corner with suspected underground tanks, the shuttered factory behind the fence with its waste piles and maybe contaminated groundwater, and maybe even the old commercial building with an asbestos-lagged heating system near downtown. Each one of these spots can be growing weeds because the perceived or actual cost of environmental remediation is more than potential developers want to spend, given the likely return on investment from re-development.

Since all our cities and virtually all smaller communities have abandoned properties, and since most of those properties have some level of environmental contamination concerns, and since the cost of environmental remediation on any scale is expensive work, federal and state environmental agencies have offered a solution: communities can access funding that will assist in putting these properties back into productive use by cleaning them up.

The subject of how a community can access these funds is another topic, but funding is available to solve brownfields issues and replace those blights on our cities with productive and useful projects.

Rick Demkovich is an environmental consultant with more than 20 years in the field. He has worked across North America and in Europe and Africa on environmental projects from site audits to remediation of facilities. He is a Certified Environmental Professional and is the president of Environmental Development Solutions, Inc.

For more information please visit http://www.envirodevelopmentsolutions.com/

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