The 2010 Korean soil preservation act: Will stabilization techniques still be feasible?

Abstract

Korean Ministry of Environment (MoE) has implicated regulations to determine if the levels of environmental contaminants exceed regulations levels. The Korean MoE adopted a partial extraction method which extracts the exchangeable fraction for heavy metals or metalloids because concern was targeted on the environmentally available fractions. However, in 2010, they have revised the test method to a total extraction using aqua regia which can extract the residual fraction as well as environmentally available phases. If one follows the new standard method, solidification/stabilization (S/S) could not meet the new criteria, since the total concentration of heavy metals and metalloids in soil would not be changed after S/S procedures as remediation technique.