r3 is a consultancy and research company specialising in the re-use of land and resources, the circular economy, contaminated sites / brownfields remediation and sustainable and risk based land management.
r3 carries out research projects, feasibility studies, technical consultancy, policy review and development, product and service development and environmental market entry, expert review and auditing and information management and networking. We also support organisations with European proposal development and drafting.
Our clients are global, including from the UK, Europe, China, Japan and the Americas, as well as multilateral international bodies.
Founded in 1997, r3 is a specialist research consultancy and a micro-SME, with expertise in sustainable and risk based brownfield re-use, contaminated land assessment and remediation; circular economy and sustainability assessment. It also has wider renewable energy, soil science and river basin management interests, and extensive interests in international contaminated land / brownfields networking, dissemination and information management.
We are a visionary company and helped initiate, with other partners, some of the first contaminated land management networking and information services in Europe in the 1990s; and some of its earliest contaminated land management decision support frameworks (e.g. EPA Report: 542-R-00-011, Editors Bardos, R.P and Sullivan, T). These networks are now well established and in widespread use, for example NICOLE: the Network for Industrially Co-ordinated Sustainable Land Management in Europe (www.nicole.org), and the UK contaminated land information charity CL:AIRE (www.claire.co.uk). More recently r3 has been one of the driving forces behind the global adoption of “sustainable remediation”, which has led to a new ISO: Soil Quality—Sustainable Remediation. ISO 18504:2017.
We carry out desk, experimental and scale-up research; technical, commercial and policy feasibility studies; and information management via networks, databases and web systems. It also supports market entry and commercial development strategies for new environmental technologies.
Examples include;
- Current Research: sustainable use of fibres produced from brownfield sites, for NETFIB, part of the SUS-Crop ERA-Net; development of measures of eco-effectiveness for supply chains in China as part of a UNIDO project with the South University of Science and Technology, Beijing; non-herbicide control of Japanese Knotweed and rapid viability testing for its rhizomes (patent application submitted June 2020).
- Feasibility studies: (2018 to present) sustainable management of radio-caesium contaminated soils in Fukushima; (2019 to present) World Bank lending project to support contaminated sites management in Kosovo; (2018 to present) green and sustainable remediation for persistent organic pollutant contaminated sites in China for the China Ministry of Environment and Ecology (MEE); (2018 to present); review of green and sustainable remediation implementation internationally (for a MOST project with the South University of Science and Technology, Beijing.
- Information management: one of the founders of NICOLE and CL:AIRE, information manager for NICOLE from 1998 to 2012. R3 also operates the EUGRIS portal for soil and water information (www.eugris.info), which currently receives around 1.5 million discrete visits per year. Planned publication of a book on “Sustainable and Risk Based Land Management” in part supported by MEE (English, Chinese and Spanish).
- Commercial and market services. R3 is currently involved with a European start up for Japanese Knotweed control and viability testing and in negotiations over a start up for a novel PFAS remediation approach. Past examples include the market entry of Regess to the UK and then Europe (https://regenesis.com/eur/) and support for a biochar remediation start up (https://www.ccuresolutions.com).
r3 works for a wide range of clients businesses (site managers, service providers) to whom it provides niche expertise from small companies to multi-nationals; local authorities and national authorities. It has participated extensively in EU research projects and has worked on projects for many countries, e.g.DE, FR, HU, NL, SE, USA, Australia, Latin America, Japan and China, and multilateral organisations including the World Bank, UNIDO, European Commission and NATO.
r3 environmental technology SAS
In 2015 r3 environmental technology SAS was founded in Colombia, in which r3 UK holds a 10% stake. R3 Colombia works extensively in Colombia on the management of land contamination, including a recent joint project (UK funded) on managing the legacy of mercury from artisanal gold mining, which remains a major ongoing interest for r3 Colombia.