Problems associated with decontamination of polluted sites showed the necessity to develop remediation technologies that are practical, fast and deployable in a wide range of physical conditions. In response to the growing need to address environmental contamination, many technologies have been developed for the treatment of in situ and ex situ soil remediation such as dig and dump, soil vapor extraction, thermal treatment and bio-remediation.
The aim of this paper is to study methods and approaches for remediation from certain organic pollutants with sorbent use.
The origin of organic pollutant compounds in soil is from uncontrolled burning of various wastes, incomplete combustion, as well as the uncontrolled dispersal and from transport units used in agriculture. From soil, pollution reaches the surface or ground water and as we use it a lot, it has a negative impact on our health.
Improvement with activated carbon (AC), to reduce exposure to contaminated soils and sediments has recently become a promising remediation process. Most studies not only on sediments and on soils were conducted in the laboratory and only few in the field. The practical experience on land scale is scarce and achievable approaches with activated carbon amendment needs to be developed, especially for soils.
Activated carbon reduces successfully the bioavailability of organic contaminants because of its strong sorption properties.
First, being an in-situ technique it is more cost-effective compared to the ex-situ remediation and it is environmental friendly because contamination problems are not moved from one place to another.
Secondly, being properly applied it does not release new quantities of pollutants as it could be in case of dredging or digging. On the third hand, sometimes it is more effective than for example purification with surfactants or other chemicals (in or ex situ) or phytoremediation.
Once pesticides are adsorbed onto activated carbon, they become biologically inactive and cannot cause damage to grass.
The major advantage that concerns our country is that currently activated charcoal began to be a local product; it is obtained by a technology proposed by the team of researchers of the Institute of Chemistry, Republic of Moldova.