Contaminated sediments and other sites present a difficult challenge for environmental decisionmakers. They are typically slow to recover or attenuate naturally, may involve multiple regulatory agencies and stakeholder groups, and engender multiple toxicological and ecotoxicological risks. While environmental decision‐making strategies over the last several decades have evolved into increasingly more sophisticated, information‐intensive, and complex approaches, there remains considerable dissatisfaction among business, industry, and the public with existing management strategies. Consequently, contaminated sediments and materials are the subject of intense technology development, such as beneficial reuse or in situ treatment. However, current decision analysis approaches, such as comparative risk assessment, benefit‐cost analysis, and life cycle assessment, do not offer a comprehensive approach for incorporating the varied types of information and multiple stakeholder and public views that must typically be brought to bear when new technologies are under consideration. Alternatively, multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) offers a scientifically sound decision framework for management of contaminated materials or sites where stakeholder participation is of crucial concern and criteria such as economics, environmental impacts, safety, and risk cannot be easily condensed into simple monetary expressions. This article brings together a multidisciplinary review of existing decision‐making approaches at regulatory agencies in the United States and Europe and synthesizes state‐of‐the‐art research in MCDA methods applicable to the assessment of contaminated sediment management technologies. Additionally, it tests an MCDA approach for coupling expert judgment and stakeholder values in a hypothetical contaminated sediments management case study wherein MCDA is used as a tool for testing stakeholder responses to and improving expert assessment of innovative contaminated sediments technologies.

A critical review finds government agencies allow, permit, license, or ignore arsenic releases to surface soils. Release rates are controlled or evaluated using risk-based soil contaminant numerical limits employing standardized risk algorithms, chemical-specific and default input values. United States arsenic residential soil limits, approximately 0.4- approximately 40 ppm, generally correspond to a one-in-one-million to a one-in-ten-thousand incremental cancer risk range via ingestion of or direct contact with contaminated residential soils. Background arsenic surface soil levels often exceed applicable limits. Arsenic releases to surface soils (via, e.g., air emissions, waste recycling, soil amendments, direct pesticide application, and chromated copper arsenic (CCA)-treated wood) can result in greatly elevated arsenic levels, sometimes one to two orders of magnitude greater than applicable numerical limits. CCA-treated wood, a heavily used infrastructure material at residences and public spaces, can release sufficient arsenic to result in surface soil concentrations that exceed numerical limits by one or two orders of magnitude. Although significant exceedence of arsenic surface soil numerical limits would normally result in regulatory actions at industrial or hazardous waste sites, no such pattern is seen at residential and public spaces. Given the current risk assessment paradigm, measured or expected elevated surface soil arsenic levels at residential and public spaces suggest that a regulatory health crisis of sizeable magnitude is imminent. In contrast, available literature and a survey of government agencies conducted for this paper finds no verified cases of human morbidity or mortality resulting from exposure to elevated levels of arsenic in surface soils. This concomitance of an emerging regulatory health crisis in the absence of a medical crisis is arguably partly attributable to inadequate government and private party attention to the issue.

The purpose of this study was to assess the cytogenetic effects of two commonly used herbicides, alachlor and atrazine, which are often found together in groundwater. Chromosome damage was examined in bone marrow cells of mice drinking water containing 20 ppm alachlor and/or 20 ppm atrazine, with an immunosuppressive dose of cyclophosphamide used as a positive control. Chromosome damage was also quantified in human lymphocytes exposed in culture to 1.0, 0.1, or 0.01 microgram/ml alachlor and/or atrazine. The in vitro study demonstrated dose related cytogenetic damage not associated with mitotic inhibition or cell death, with damage due to the alachlor-atrazine combination suggesting an additive model. The in vivo study also suggested additive damage due to the alachloratrazine combination after 30 days of treatment, but, unexpectedly, demonstrated less cytogenetic damage and fewer cells with multiple aberrations after 90 days. Also, at 90 days, all treated mice had elevated mitotic indices compared to controls. The fact that the elevated mitotic index was associated with immune suppression in the cyclophosphamide group suggests that death of cells with accumulated chromosomal aberrations resulted in increased bone marrow proliferation, so a higher fraction of cells examined were newer with less damage. Since the alachlor-atrazine combination treated mice showed little systemic toxicity despite bone marrow mitotic indices similar to the cyclophosphamide treated animals, as well as a similar decrease in cytogenetic damage at 90 days compared to 30 days, cell death and replacement must also be involved but cannot completely explain the results.

Current uncertainties in our understanding of ecosystems require shifting from optimization‐based management to an adaptive management paradigm. Risk managers routinely make suboptimal decisions because they are forced to predict environmental response to different management policies in the face of complex environmental challenges, changing environmental conditions, and even changing social priorities. Rather than force risk managers to make single suboptimal management choices, adaptive management explicitly acknowledges the uncertainties at the time of the decision, providing mechanisms to design and institute a set of more flexible alternatives that can be monitored to gain information and reduce the uncertainties associated with future management decisions. Although adaptive management concepts were introduced more than 20 y ago, their implementation has often been limited or piecemeal, especially in remedial decision making. We believe that viable tools exist for using adaptive management more fully. In this commentary, we propose that an adaptive management approach combined with multicriteria decision analysis techniques would result in a more efficient management decision‐making process as well as more effective environmental management strategies. A preliminary framework combining the 2 concepts is proposed for future testing and discussion.