NICOLE Network Spring Meeting & Workshop, First Announcement & Call for Papers

Turning failure into success – What can we learn when remediation does not go as planned
NICOLE Network Spring Meeting & Workshop
Vienna, Austria, 15-17 June 2016

There is continuous effort needed to manage land contamination in an effective way, and hence to find ways to optimize the current ways of working. Often, workshops and conferences try to find the solutions in presenting success cases as templates to replicate. Yet, there are a number of remediation projects not meeting the various stakeholders expectations and thus requiring new thinking to achieve the outcome expected. Owing to the level of trust NICOLE’s members have built over time among themselves, it seems possible to have open discussions around projects having encountered obstacles on their way to completion and to learn from these. Therefore the decision was taken to hold a workshop on the non-successes, and even on the failures or on “what goes wrong” and what we can learn from this for the next project or the future.
The first topic to deal with is the definition of “failure” in the context of remediation projects. During the workshop, the results of a questionnaire (recently sent around) will be communicated, together with experiences out of other businesses (lawyers, chemical production,…). As a first approach, failures can be technical, strategical, due to environmental or regulatory boundary conditions etc.
Examples are: exceeding the budget, disappointing the stakeholders, application of suboptimal or even “wrong” technology, Health & Safety requirements or remediation goals may be finally met, but not within the expected time frame.
We would appreciate if you would to send in an abstract dealing with issues mentioned above with examples of “lessons learned” from these non-success projects. But please be aware that pure success stories will be rejected. The abstract should at least contain a description of the project, what type of “failure” happened and why and what should be done to prevent it from happening again.
  
This workshop will be of interest to problem owners, consultants, contractors, academics, lawyers, and regulators.
 
Submission Guidelines
Authors are required to submit a one page abstract on the paper they would like to present, together with a brief outline of the structure of the paper (up to 6 bullet points) and a short biography. Abstracts should be submitted to the NICOLE secretariat (Nan.Su@nicole.org) by 29 February 2016 and should indicate whether they are intended as an oral or poster presentation.
  
Timeline to the Workshop
Abstracts will be considered by the Organising Committee and authors of successful submissions will be notified by 25 March 2016. Both invited speakers and authors of papers accepted for oral presentation may be asked to modify their Abstracts in order to avoid repetition and to achieve a balanced programme. If it is not possible to accommodate all the oral submissions within the conference programme Authors may be offered the option of a poster presentation. Submissions that are not accepted will also be notified at that time.
 
 
Chair of the Organization Committee:  
Wouter Gevaerts – Arcadis (BE) and Hans-Peter Koschitzky – VEGAS Uni Stuttgart (DE)
 
Organization Committee
Alan Thomas – ERM (UK)
Bruno van Dunné – sbns (NL)
Dietmar Müller-Grabherr – Environment Agency Austria (AT)
Elise Noël – Shell (FR)
Markus Ackermann – DuPont (SZ)
Niklas Torneman – SWECO (SB)
Rob Rutjes – Lyondellbasell (NL)
 

 

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