Soil Contamination

Abstract

Soil contamination has severely increased over the last decades, mainly due to petroleum hydrocarbons, solvents, pesticides, lead and other heavy metals from industrial wastes and human activities. The critical point regarding contaminated soil monitoring is the intrinsic difficulty in defining fixed monitoring variables and indicators as the establishment of any a priori criterion and threshold for soil quality can be still considered subjective. This book is organized into eight chapters and presents the state-of-the art and new research highlights in the context of contaminated soil monitoring and remediation strategies, including examples from South America, Europe and Asia. The chapters deal with the following topics: - monitoring of dioxin, furan, hydrocarbons and heavy metals level in soils - bioindicators and biomarkers for the assessment of soil toxicity - use of reflectance spectroscopy for soil contaminants and waste material detection - remediation technologies and strategies.