Soil materials (excavated soil, dredged materials)

MD establishing codes of good practice for demarcation of a cadastral working area and for the use of soilmaterials within a cadastral working area, and a standard procedure for drawing up technical reports for theuse of soil materials

In the Regulation for the use of soil materials in the VLAREBO Decree of 14 December 2007 (the Earth-Movement Regulation), the Flemish Government also provided for the use of soil materials as soil and asstructural land use within a cadastral working area. In this context, the Flemish Government has defined theterm ‘cadastral working area’ (Article 158(5) of the VLAREBO). Where a specific earth-movement file focuseson the use of soil materials within the cadastral working area, an approved soil remediation expert must, inaccordance with the earth-movement regulation in the technical report, define the cadastral working area(s) onthe basis of the code of good practice for the demarcation of the cadastral working area (Articles 163 and 180VLAREBO). The soil materials must be used within the demarcated working area in accordance with a code ofgood practice (Articles 164 and 172 of the VLAREBO). The definition of the term ‘cadastral working area’, asamended by the Flemish Government by decision of 22 December 2023, reads as follows: ‘a set of lands withsimilar characteristics that have an equivalent significant effect on the environment or pose an equivalentsignificant risk to human health that is delimited for the use of soil materials in the context of implementing aproject. The similar characteristics relate to the soil, the functions that the soil performs or will perform, and theactivities carried out on the soil, in particular:

a) the purpose type, the former and current function of the lands;
b) the future function of the lands;
c) the contamination hypothesis for the soil of the lands;
d) the pollution characteristics of the soil of the lands:
1) pollution status;
2) the distribution pattern;
3) the nature of the contamination;
4) the severity of the contamination;
e) the specific application of soil materials that have been introduced in the past.
The project may consist of the implementation of natural-area use, land use or landscape construction, or thedevelopment of a building, infrastructure or civil engineering application, or several of those elements together,where the realisation of those elements constitutes a geographical or operationally coherent whole which maybe carried out in stages and may be the subject of separate permits or authorisations.’
Further clarification of the definition of ‘cadastral working area’ also necessitates an adaptation of the existingcodes of good practice for the demarcation of a cadastral working area, the code of good practice for the useof soil materials within a cadastral working area, and the standard procedure for technical reports. This iscarried out with the notified Ministerial Decree.