Preparation

Market consultation

In order to further focalise the challenge, a market consultation was started in mid-January 2018 in collaboration with Addestino.

The market consultation took place in phases.

First, a scoping session was held on 13 February 2018 in order to define the scope of the project as well as possible. This session resulted in the first mission brief that can be consulted below (document available in Dutch only).

On 13 March 2018, an announcement session was held with a number of stakeholders (from the various levels of government involved, as well as from the scientific community).

Subsequently, in two sessions (on 14 September 2018 and on 10 October 2018), a number of use cases were drawn up and prioritised. The aim was to confront demand and supply on the basis of these use cases during the 'actual' market consultation.

The various working sessions described above revealed a number of conflicting requirements, which can largely be attributed to four areas of tension:

• The representativeness of the test versus the safety of the operation;
• The final responsibility versus the absence of applicable safe threshold values of concentrations of substances present;
• Only the armed forces are allowed to touch and remove ammunition, whereas DOVO only wants to take over ammunition safely on the beach;
• No storage situation of explosives may arise versus one (or more) unit(s) of ammunition must be brought ashore.

In order to get out of this conflict situation and (re)direct this PIP project, a reflection session was held on 13 December 2018.

The outcome of the reflection session was written down in a revised mission brief that can be consulted below (document available in Dutch only).

During the reflection session, it was decided to continue the PIP project but with a modified scope, whereby the following choices were made:

• The aim of the PIP project is to carry out a test that is representative 'as far as possible';
• The Flemish government determines the framework conditions for the test in consultation with all parties involved;
• Each unit of ammunition to be salvaged must be safely retrieved and safely left ashore;
• It is not an aim within this PIP project to obtain results on the processing of the retrieved ammunition for disposal purposes.

Based on these choices, Addestino wrote an adapted scoping document in preparation for the market consultation and also carried out a state-of-the-art analysis. The 'actual' market consultation finally took place on 10 October 2019. The report of the market consultation (in Dutch) and a summary (in English) are available below.