Dear Moderator,
The Department for Environmental Protection as part of the municipality of Stuttgart highly appreciates the Voluntary Guidelines for Sustainable Soil Management (VGSSM).
The guidelines are focused on the crucial aspects of soil protection.
The City of Stuttgart made excellent experiences implementing the municipal Soil Protection Concept since 2006. This concept is in line with the chapters 3.1, 3.8 and 3.9 of the VGSSM.
Therefore we expect positive impacts of the guidelines on soil protection.
As a completion of chapter 1 we propose to highlight that the guidelines aim at an equal ranking of soil protection compared with the protection of other envornmental compartments. .
Until today the relevance of soil as a basis for life is considerably underestimated compared with water, air, flora and fauna.
Best regards
Dr. Hans-Wolf Zirkwitz
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Landeshauptstadt Stuttgart
Amt für Umweltschutz
Dr. Hans-Wolf Zirkwitz
Amtsleiter
Hans-Wolf Zirkwitz