Abstract
The past human activities, mainly that related to industrial development caused in many cases a strong contamination of soil, subsoil environment and of groundwater. This type of pollution is a concern because it poses risks to human health and to the ecosystem. More than this, such areas may not be used for new development, requiring solutions for remediation. The management of these sites consists of three main activities: characterization, remediation and, finally, redevelopment. The paper presents a case study dedicated to the first step of contaminated sites management, respectively characterization. This phase is very important, a good characterization could ensure a performant solution for the second step – remediation. Two new techniques for site characterization are presented, as technical principles, but also as performances obtained for the mentioned case study.
Highlights
Industrial activities, municipal and industrial waste disposal, mining activity and other human developments during the past industrial revolution all over the world generated the contamination of soil, subsoil and groundwater
The difficulty of remediation of contaminated areas is generated by a series of aspects, which relate to their specificity: (a) accessibility of the underground environment; (b) complexity of the underground environment, formed by the interlocking of three phases: liquid, gaseous, solid; (c) the physical, chemical and biological mechanisms that act on the pollutants reaching in the underground environment [2]
Characterization of contaminated sites is one of the most difficult activities, because the local data must be extrapolated to have a clear image of the whole subsurface area
Summary
Industrial activities, municipal and industrial waste disposal, mining activity and other human developments during the past industrial revolution all over the world generated the contamination of soil, subsoil and groundwater. The concern of the management of these areas results from the consequences that pollution puts on the future use of these areas, on one hand and from the risks on human health and the ecosystem as a whole on the other hand As it is well known, the main stages of contaminated sites management are (i) characterization of contaminated sites, (ii) remediation and (iii) redevelopment of the area (Fig. 1). To achieve decontamination levels based on human health protection is not always feasible – the costs and the time necessary for this goal could be very high Based on this fact, the future use of contaminated sites must be designed considering the level of remediation that may be achieved in a technical – economical judgment. In other words, the level of remediation could be fixed based on the requirements of a designed activity that has been planned for a specific contaminated site, meaning that it must not be subjected to human health-based criteria on every occasion
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