Page 18 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

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Introduction

1.1 Background and Objectives
The hazardous waste management business has steadily increased since the
mid-1970s as public concern led to a vast range of new and stringent envi-
ronmental regulations. With regard to groundwater and soil, a substantial
amount of time and expense has been devoted to studying impacted sites,
with much of the effort dedicated to litigation to determine the financially
responsible parties. However, the focus has switched in recent years from lit-
igation and site assessment to remediation. Site restoration usually proceeds
through several phases and requires a concerted, multidisciplinary effort.
Thus, remediation professionals come from a variety of technical and educa-
tional backgrounds, including geology, hydrology, chemistry, microbiology,
meteorology, toxicology and epidemiology, as well as chemical, mechanical,
electrical, industrial, civil, and environmental engineering. Because of dif-
ferences in the formal education and training of these professionals, their
ability to perform or review remediation design calculations varies consider-
ably. For some, performing accurate design calculations for site remediation
can become a seemingly insurmountable task.
Groundwater and soil remediation is more complicated than the conven-
tional water and wastewater treatment because characteristics of soil and
subsurface geology/hydrogeology greatly affect the implementability and
effectiveness of a given technology. The absence of uniformly trained spe-
cialists is exacerbated by the continuously evolving remediation technolo-
gies. While up-to-date design information is sporadically published in the
literature, it is usually theoretical in nature, and illustrative applications are
rarely given. Most, if not all, of the books dealing with site remediation pro-
vide only descriptive information on remedial technologies, and none, in
this author’s opinion, provide helpful guidance on illustrations of practical
design calculations.
Selection of a proper remedial alternative is site-specific. One needs to
know the applicability and limitations of each technology before a smart
decision can be made. In addition to knowing how a remedial technology
works, it is more important to know why it may not work for an impacted site.

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