Qualitative vs. quantitative risk evaluation in contaminated sites management

Besides their advantages, both types of evaluation systems have disadvantages, as well as weak and insecure components, in terms of involved costs, time demand, necessity of stakeholders involvement, and the system flexibility. The current study describes contaminated sites-related background information and includes the identification and comparison of qualitative ranking methods and quantitative (multi-attribute) risk assessments in the field. An innovative method is introduced for appropriately combining components and processes of both quantitative and qualitative methods into a process with a minimized level of disadvantages, and which avoids the involvement of weak structures or methods. Furthermore, this current work uses an elicitation method for relatively weighting the components affecting risk from contaminated sites and transforms this elicitation into a qualitative evaluation. The developed method is proven by case studies, and validated against classical evaluation methods. It has been proven that this process may be considered as an alternative for preliminary evaluation of suspected contaminated sites.