SOIL REMEDIATION

Soil Remediation Technologies by Foundation Specialists The word Remediation comes from the Latin REMEDIARE, which means “TO HEAL”, Pollution, comes from the Latin POLLUTION which means exactly “POLLUTION”, “CONTAMINATION”. Pollution, contamination of the environment and in particular, for the case in subject, ground contamination, is a continuous process, and a great part of it is being done by human activities, such as careless dumping of urban refusals, including heavy metals (e.g. cadmium batteries) hospital waste, raw sewage , indiscriminate dumping by the chemical industry of harmful by-products, factories’ effluents, dumping of animal waste (e.g. from piggeries} without proper treatment, which produce harmful lechates, improper disposal of mine tailings, including mercury, spilling of petroleum products, among others. Everybody can easily see the most common kind of pollution of the environment done by indiscriminate and unregulated dumping of urban refusal of any kind, we can also, without effort, observe the visual effects of water pollution in rivers, lakes and the sea-coast areas, even at the early stages of pollution: it is instead difficult if not totally improbable to be able to observe in a casual way the damage done to water table/aquifer by the introduction of harmful substances or products into the ground. The contamination of the water table/aquifer is an insidious type of pollution. Here the use of the word “insidious” is neither done by chance or for drama , but to emphasize the fact that contamination of the underground waters has become a worldwide (man-made) calamity because it happens over time, slowly, generally undetected. The most common cases of aquifer contamination are produced by the combination of indiscriminate dumping of wastes of any kind or industrial by-products toxic or potentially toxic, with rainwater or surface waters , resulting into the production of toxic lechates percolating into the aquifers. Generally when the pollution, contamination or poisoning of water table are detected , it is because the damage to the aquifers is already so great that the effects of water contamination have been taking a toll on public health and the only available solution is finding alternative sources of fresh water, (with the complication that natural alternative sources of fresh water might not be easily available). The “soil remediation” into which Foundation Specialists has poured years of research and development activity, is dealing with isolating or encapsulating the polluted soil (or ground in the generic sense) to prevent pollutants and contaminants from leaching into the aquifers. Foundation Specialists research and development of technologies dealing with “soil remediation” has been continuous, theories and design have been subjected to field verification and testing all the way, to assure the applicability and adaptability of technologies to varied field conditions to verify the results of the interventions and the consistency of the results obtaining , both on the short and the long term. In a nut-shell, the soil remediation technologies developed by Foundation Specialists are designed to isolate the sources of pollution by surrounding then all around (Cut-Off Wall) and below (Bottom Plug), with a totally impervious curtain or cut-off and bottom plug impervious medium , non-degradable with time and indefinitely leachate-resistant. The curtain or cut-off has to be also made in such a way to remain indefinitely able to stretch and deform following the settlements and deformations of the surrounding ground, in order to avoid forming cracks that would allow loss of leachates from the contained areas. If the Soil underlying the areas so confined is clay, the cut-off wall shall penetrate into it so to completely isolate the pollution from the water table, while if the soil underlying the area is non cohesive, a bottom plug ver the whole area can be made by Jet-grouting cement Bentonite to render the bottom area totally impervious to pollution. Likewise the FS Soil-Bentonite-Cement treatment can be done to encapsulate polluting matters already existing in the soil great advantage of the soil remediation technologies developed by Foundation Specialists is that they can be used as "environmental site- conditioning", for the preparation of environmentally safe landfill areas or dumping areas, so that instead of being used to remedy damages to the environment, with a little foresight by the public officials and urban planners, these technologies can be employed to prevent damages to the environment, with obvious and enormous benefits to public health and the environment and the economy in general