The term is used in contradistinction to a “greenfields” development, where the opposite is true. Remediating and redeveloping these sites offer such public benefits as job creation, new housing and business development, additional property tax revenues, lower municipal infrastructure costs, preservation of agricultural land and revitalised older neighbourhoods. Unmanaged, brownfields represent a significant loss of economic opportunity. In the context of environmental law, this duty has been codified in various environmental statutes and imposes a duty to act with due care to avoid damage to others and to the environment or, where an impact is unavoidable, to mitigate such harm. This “environmental statutory duty of care” dictates that where a legal entity’s activities present risk to the environment, it is duty-bound to take measures to prevent or mitigate such risks.Ĭommon law principles such as sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas (use your property in a way that does not harm another) form the basis of this duty. The combination of the contaminated land legal regime and the Remediation Standards has introduced a more technical approach to the assessment of the status and risk posed by contaminated land, and the potential corollary duty to remediate significantly contaminated soil.Īnother reason that this is not new law is that common law relating to the care of the environment has been in place in codified form since at least 1999 in South Africa. In addition to the entry into force of the contaminated land legal regime in the Waste Act, the minister also published the National Norms and Standards for the Remediation of Contaminated Land and Soil Quality (the “Remediation Standards”).
On May 2 2014, the minister of water and environmental affairs published a general notice in the Government Gazette formally bringing into effect the contaminated land legal regime provided for in the contentious part 8 of chapter 4 of the National Environmental Management: Waste Act 59 of 2008 (the “Waste Act”). In the midst of all this, it is important to keep in mind that the legal regime relating to contaminated land is not a brand new law. Most of the articles carried dire warnings about the dangers of noncompliance with the contaminated land rules, woeful lamentations on how the law will curtail the right to freely dispose of land that might be contaminated, and urgent advice to commence immediately with formal assessment of land that might be contaminated with a view to registering it with the government.
0 kommentar(er)
