Achieving Remediation And GOverning Restoration of contaminated soils Now

Project Information

ARAGORN

Grant agreement ID: 101112723

DOI

10.3030/101112723

EC signature date 19 May 2023

Start date 1 October 2023

End date 30 September 2027

Funded under

• Food, Bioeconomy Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment

Total cost

€ 6 612 911,01

EU contribution

€ 6 612 911,00

Coordinated by

KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET
Denmark

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ARAGORN (Achieving Remediation And GOverning Restoration of contaminated soils Now)

Reporting period: 2023-10-01 to 2025-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Soil pollution across Europe isn’t just a “dirty” problem—it can make our food and drinking water unsafe, damage plants and wildlife, contribute to biodiversity loss and threaten groundwater resources. Finding solutions to this dirty problem is the key focus of ARAGORN.
What is ARAGORN? It stands for Achieving Remediation And GOverning Restoration of contaminated soils Now. ARAGORN is an inter-European effort to give land owners of contaminated, and local authorities of contaminated land, simple step-by-step plans to:
1) Find and map polluted land
2) Decide what needs cleaning up, how fast, and how much it will cost
3) Work with site owners and authorities to pick the best cleanup methods for their specific situation to achieve their land use and environmental goals
4) Track how well the cleanup is working, right down to testing trace levels of contaminants in water resources to tiny bits of DNA in the soil to see if plants and microbes are bouncing back

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

ARAGORN is building to tools prioritize the most common “stubborn” pollutants (think heavy metals, PFAS “forever chemicals,” old industrial solvents and oils) and show who uses them and where they’re likely to end up.

ARAGORN is creating planning tools, that considers finances, impacts and resilience to future threats, so you know in advance how much each cleanup option will cost and if it will achieve the desired impact.

ARAGORN has collected all the official safety limits for soil across Europe—so you can quickly see if a field is safe or needs work in your regions

ARAGORN has researched and field-tested a range of cleanup methods, from biochar (a charcoal-like soil amendment) to specially chosen plants that suck up toxins. An example of this is using plants to suck up mobile toxins, then pyrolyzing this to destroy the toxins and make a product called biochar that can soak up more toxins in the soil.

ARAGORN is developing an international guide on how to take soil samples—so every test is done the right way, in order to see if your land is contaminated or not and if it needs remediation.

ARAGORN is developing methods using environmental DNA (eDNA) to check how soil life recovers after cleanup—because healthy microbes and fungi mean healthy soil.

The collection of all this information will feed into a single “decision dashboard” that weighs risks to people and nature, how fast the soil can bounce back, and what you can afford. Currently this is in the prototype stage.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Here’s how ARAGORN’s achievements push far beyond what’s been done before:

1) Ambitious “Polluter–Pollutant” Catalogue
We’ve created the most comprehensive Europe-wide directory that links specific human activities (from metalworking and firefighting foams to old industrial sites) with the exact problematic chemicals they release—covering heavy metals, PFAS, legacy chlorinated and brominated compounds, oils and PAHs. This involved detailed contact with several environmental agencies. No other effort has mapped such a broad mix of pollutants to their real-world sources in one go, the closest would be efforts on metal pollution by the EEA and PFAS from the Forever Pollution Project.

2) Holistic Cost-Benefit Analysis toward assessing Cleanup Strategies
Previous tools only looked at price tags or environmental gains in isolation. Our inventory matrix is the first to score every cleanup method (from bicohar additives to plant-based filters) against a full suite of factors: cleanup cost, speed, local ecosystem health, human-health risks, regulatory hurdles, community acceptance and more. This will be developed further, but the goal of this work is to provide bird’s-eye view for different soil pollution scenarios that lets decision-makers weigh trade-offs with unmatched clarity.

3) First Co-Creation Guide Adopted as a European Standard
We drafted a step-by-step process for researchers, land managers and local communities to team up on real-life polluted sites. That guide is now officially embedded in CEN Workshop Agreement CWA 18201 (April 2025), giving Europe its first common playbook for tackling so-called PMT/vPvM “forever” chemicals in soil, water and sediment. This guidance emphasize the importance of co-creation in soil remediation projects, and why it is important to take early efforts in o-creation to encourage ownership of remediation solutions and follow-up actions

4) Pioneering Soil-Resilience Framework
No prior project has treated soil cleanup as a chance to build resilience—to help land not just recover, but better withstand future shocks (like floods or new pollutants). Our conceptual model blends ecological rebound metrics, risk assessment and adaptive management into one coherent approach, so restoration projects leave soils stronger than they were.

Together, these four breakthroughs don’t just fill gaps — they reframe the art of soil remediation and set a new benchmark for science-driven, community-anchored, forward-looking cleanup across Europe.