• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
• /
• v.45 no.4
• /
• pp.311-318
• /
• 2007

Soil contamination in Korea has been accelerated every year. Because of their persistence and cumulative tendency in the environment, soil contaminants have potential long-term environmental and health concerns and it is estimated to cost enormous expense for clean-up. Korea government has legislated the law on conservation of soil environment in mid 1990s, and managed and treated hazardous wastes in contaminated sites as a remediation policy since then. Soil remediation technologies are classified into in-situ/ex-situ or biological/physico-chemical/thermal processes according to applied places or treatment methods, respectively. In Korea, clean-up of polluted sites has been mostly carried out at military areas, railroad-related sites and small-scale oil spilt sites. For these cases, in-situ remediation technologies such as soil vapor extraction (SVE) and bioventing were mainly used. In recent days, an environmental-friendly soil remediation emerged as a new concept - for example, a new soil remediation process using nanotechnology or molecular biological study and an integrated process which can overcome the limitation of individual process. To have better applicability of remediation technologies, comprehensive understandings about the pollutants and soil characteristics and the suitable techniques are required to be investigated. Above all, development of environmental technologies based on the sustainability accompanied by public attention can improve soil environment in Korea.

• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
• /
• v.25 no.4
• /
• pp.1-6
• /
• 2020

Recently, ex-situ remediation technologies has been emerging to clean up contaminated soils mainly because the in-situ techniques have limited applicability and technical difficulties in relatively small contaminated sites. Accordingly, implementation of off-site treatment and disposal have been continuously increased in soil remediation and restoration projects in Korea. However, in many cases, reclaimed soil is still not properly recycled or reused. Therefore, there is an urgent need to document the current status of soil management practices in soil remediation projects in the nation. This study presents a survey of soil contamination status and remedial approaches in Korea based on soil cleanup projects completed in 2015 - 2019, and proposes the possible options of the recycling or reusing the reclaimed soils under compliance with related regulations. The results of the soil survey showed soil contamination was most severe in gas stations, industrial facilities, and military areas. The major types of pollution were related to the petroleum-contaminated site (TPH and BTEX) with 77.0% occurrence in all the contaminated sites. The reclaimed soils were mostly reused as a ground filling-up soils in industrial facilities (60.0%) and warehouses (37.0%).

• Journal of the Korean Society of Environmental Restoration Technology
• /
• v.10 no.5
• /
• pp.76-86
• /
• 2007

For the purpose of ground improvement by means of soil flushing systems. Incorporated technique with prefabricated vertical drains have been used for dewatering from fine-grained soils. The laboratory model tests were performed by using the flushing tracer solutions for silty soils and recorded the tracer concentration changes with the elapsed time and flow rates. A mathematical model for prediction of contaminant transport using the PVD technology has been developed. The clean-up times for the predictions on both soil condition indicate more of a sensitivity to the dispersivity parameter than to the extracted flow rate and vertical velocity parameters. Based on the results of the analyses, numerical analysis indicate that the most important factor to the in-situ soil remediation in prefabricated vertical drain system is the effective diameter of contaminated soil.

• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
• /
• v.18 no.6
• /
• pp.1-7
• /
• 2013

Groundwater development and use have been increasing in Korea causing frequent occurrences of related hazards such as groundwater level decline, land subsidence, and groundwater contamination. To tackle these groundwater problems, central and local governments have set-up and maintained many groundwater monitoring programs such as the National Groundwater Monitoring Network and the Groundwater Quality Monitoring Network, which collect very valuable data on the overall status of domestic groundwater to aid proper groundwater management. However, several problems mainly related to the remediation of contaminated groundwater remain unresolved. Recently, there have been some incidents related to the contamination of groundwater, and these have drawn the concern of the Korean people. Although groundwater contamination has been investigated in detail, actual groundwater remediation work has not yet been implemented. The remediation of the contaminated groundwater must begin immediately in order to sustain the eco-system service of clean groundwater and enhance the welfare of the Korean people.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Soil and Groundwater Environment Conference
• /
• 2003.04a
• /
• pp.25-39
• /
• 2003

Risk and exposure assessment for subsurface environment is very important for both aspects of health and environmental protection as well as making decision of remedial goal for engineering activities. Exposure due to hazardous chemicals in the subsurface environment is essential to assess risk lev121 to individual person, especially from soil and groundwater environmental media. In this paper, the status of soil and groundwater contamination is presented to discuss on the problem for environmental risk assessment. The methodologies of fate and exposure models are also discussed by conducting the case studies of exposure assessment for heavy metals, organic compounds, and dioxin compounds. In addition, the structure of exposure models and available data for model calculation are examined to make clear more realistic exposure scenarios and the application to the practical environmental issues. Three kinds of advanced remediation techniques for soil and groundwater contamination are described in this paper, The most practical method for VOCs is the bio-remediation technique in which biological process due to consortium of microorganisms can be applied. For more effective remediation of soil contaminated by heavy metals we have adopted the soil flushing technique and clean-up system using electro-kinetic method. We have also developed the advanced techniques of geo-melting method for soil contaminated by DXNs and PCB compounds. These techniques are planed to introduce and to apply for a lot of contaminated sites in Japan.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Groundwater Environment
• /
• v.3 no.2
• /
• pp.60-69
• /
• 1996

Along with rapid industrial development, toxic chemicals have been discharged extensively into the environment. Many of them have flowed into the soil which is final acceptor of environmental pollutants. As a result, they have deteriorated soil and groundwater environment. Once the soil and groundwater were contaminated by pollutants, these media can not be easily restored without artificial remediation. Foreign countries which accomplished earlier industrialization compared to our country have invested enormous capital for the remediation of contaminated sites and the development of relevant technology. In our country the reserch on the development of remediation technology has been conducted for several years, but it is still in its initial stage. This report represents remediation technologies, their adaptability and clean up procedure etc. which are being used for the managenent of contaminated site in advanced countries.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Soil and Groundwater Environment Conference
• /
• 1998.11a
• /
• pp.48-51
• /
• 1998

This paper presents the transport and removal of organic substances from the contaminated soft soils and sludges such as marine dredging waste, marine sediments, mine tailing waste, and sewage sludge by electroosmosis. A series of laboratory experiments including variable conditions such as contamination levels, solid contents, and applied voltage rates were peformed with the contaminated soft clay specimen mixed with organic substance. Investigated are specimen density, dewatering rate, outflow rate, and outflow concentration. The test results showed that organic substances in the soils were removed by applied voltages. The results indicated that this process can be used efficiently to clean up the contaminated soil.

• Proceedings of the KSR Conference
• /
• 2011.10a
• /
• pp.2870-2874
• /
• 2011

Soil pollution around railroad has been occurred mainly by diesel and lubricant oil, which is difficult to treat due to high carbon number. In this study, we investigated the feasibility of inorganic-inorganic nanohybrid photo-catalyst for the remediation of diesel-contaminated railroad soil. Generally, the $TiO_2$ nanoparticle easily removes organic pollutants due to photo and natural clay of layer structure. Also, montmorillonite (MMT) have an excellent absorption property with organic component. So, we prepared $TiO_2$ pillared MMT nanohybrid photo-catalyst as a chemical oxidant through the integration of theses advantage. As a result, the removal efficiency of diesel was more than 45% at a laboratory-scale test with diesel concentration and the amount of $TiO_2$-MMT. In future, we will improve the removal efficiency of diesel to optimize experimental parameters and apply the field soil The remediation method using photo-catalyst can be used to clean up the railroad soil polluted with high concentration instead of common methods such as soil washing, bioremediation, etc..

• Proceedings of the Korean Geotechical Society Conference
• /
• 2005.10a
• /
• pp.373-381
• /
• 2005

The permeability of contaminated soil and elapsed time are important considering factors to in-situ soil remadiation. Gabr et. al. (1996) derived the solution equation of contaminant concentration ratio as initial one (C/$C_0$) with time and spatial changes in contaminated area which embedded with vertical drains. The contaminant concentration ratio (C/$C_0$) is analyzed with time and spatial changes in three different permeability areas which are $k=l.0{\times}10^{-5,}$ $l.0{\times}l0^{-6,}$ $l.0{\times}l0^{-7}\;_{m/s}$ by using the Gabr's equation. Results from numerical analysis indicate that the ratio (C/$C_0$) decreases as the elapsed time increases in every point, however, remediation efficiency decreases as the analyzing point is far from injection well to extraction one and is deeper from top level of contaminated area. And also it decreases as the permeability of contaminated area decreases. Especially, the lower permeability of contaminated area effects directly on the soil remediation, in this research, under condition which the permeability of contaminated area is $l.0{\times}l0^{-7}\;_{m/s}$, the maximum time needed to attain 90% clean up level ($t_{90}$) is 65,690 hours(7.5 years), it takes so much time to clean the low permeability contaminated soil.

• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
• /
• v.17 no.6
• /
• pp.69-81
• /
• 2012

Diverse geostatistical tools such as kriging have been used to estimate the volume and spatial coverage of contaminated soil needed for remediation. However, many approaches frequently yield estimation errors, due to inherent geostatistical uncertainties. Such errors may yield over- or under-estimation of the amounts of polluted soils, which cause an over-estimation of remediation cost as well as an incomplete clean-up of a contaminated land. Therefore, it is very important to use a better estimation tool considering uncertainties arising from incomplete field investigation (i.e., contamination survey) and mathematical spatial estimation. In the current work, as better estimation tools we propose stochastic simulation approaches which allow the remediation volume to be assessed more accurately along with uncertainty estimation. To test the efficiency of proposed methods, heavy metals (esp., Pb) contaminated soil of a shooting range area was selected. In addition, we suggest a quantitative method to delineate the confident interval of estimated volume (and spatial extent) of polluted soil based on the spatial aspect of uncertainty. The methods proposed in this work can improve a better decision making on soil remediation.