A Prospective Decision-Making Model for Contaminated Site Remediation Technology Selection Under Green and Sustainable Remediation

Green and Sustainable Remediation (GSR) has gained widespread recognition in contaminated site remediation. Several countries and international organizations have issued standards and guidelines for GSR frameworks, such as ISO 18504:2017 and the guideline developed by the Sustainable Remediation Forum UK. However, these frameworks remain largely qualitative and lack quantitative, operational tools for comparing remediation technologies, such as chemical oxidation, thermal desorption, and biopiles. To address this gap, this study develops a prospective decision-making model based on GSR. The model selects three environmental indicators, two economic indicators, and one social indicator, determines their weights using the entropy weight method, and adopts VIsekriterijumska optimizacija i KOmpromisno Resenje (VIKOR) for compromise ranking under conflicting criteria. Applied to a petroleum hydrocarbon-contaminated site in the Yangtze River Delta region of China, the model yields a stable ranking of biopiles > chemical oxidation > thermal desorption across different compromise scenarios, and sensitivity analysis confirms its robustness. A complementary Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) using SimaPro 9.6.0.1 further identifies environmental impact sources and supports GSR improvement recommendations. The results indicate that the environmental impacts of thermal desorption are dominated by tail-gas treatment and backfilling, whereas those of biopiles mainly originate from nutrient and material inputs.