Different technologies for contaminated soil remediation: hurdles and perspectives

COSTA-GUTIERREZ SB; RAIMONDO EE; APARICIO JD; SAEZ JM; ALVAREZ A; POLTI MA; BENIMELI CS

nvironmental Nexus Approach: Management of Water, Waste, and Soil

CRC Press (Tayor and Francis Group)

Año: 2023; p. 1 - 45

Soil contamination by organic and inorganic pollutants has greatly increased in recent decades due to anthropogenic actions, such as unsafe human practices, higher consumption rates, expanding urbanization, and industrial activities. The toxic pollutants frequently found in soil involves hydrocarbons, chlorophenols, pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls, and heavy metals. Due to the adverse effects of the contaminants on the environment and/or human health, different physicochemical and biological technologies have been emerging for soil restoration. Physicochemical methods are efficient and fast, but laborious and expensive, while biological ones, involving bioremediation, phytoremediation, and vermiremediation, have greater social acceptance and are environmentally friendly, although they require more time to dissipate contaminants and are limited in scope to those pollutants that are susceptible to undergo biotransformation. Each technology presents limitations related to the contaminants properties, wide soil diversity, and cost/benefit relationship, so a single remediation process might not be adequate for reducing the concentrations of all types of chemical compounds to acceptable levels in some situations. These issues can be alleviated by combining different cleaning-up processes, which has showed higher efficiency in pollutants removal and economic benefits, by overcoming the limitations of each single technique. This chapter focus on the principles of the main remediation techniques employed for restoring polluted soils, as well as the analysis of their advantages and disadvantages. It also presents successful cases as a result of combining different technologies. The chapter pretends to help researchers in choosing the appropriate technology to employ in soil remediation, based on the experience and results of authors from different regions of the world.