With land being at such a premium these days it is essential for contaminated or polluted land to be made available for domestic and residential or commercial use. This is where the process of land remediation is required. Land remediation cleans up such sites and makes them available for further use. Remediation Contractors like https://soilfix.co.uk/ are perfect for this.
The main aim of land remediation is to clear up any substances that can be considered harmful to health. These will be present in soil or groundwater. The objective is to restore the land to what it was before so that it can be used again for purposes that are much better suited to modern living. There are several stages involved in land remediation.
- Assessment of the site. This is the initial stage where the issue of the contamination can be assessed and examined. What effects it may have on human health and the wider environment are also illustrated.
- Plan of remediation. Once the assessment is completed a plan can be drawn up that shows what the most important techniques and processes need to be to make the site clean.
- Once the plan and assessment are completed the full remediation can take place. This involves a range of processes and treatments that are applied to the soil or groundwater. Many of these include excavation and the use of neutralising chemical agents and the cleansing of soil.
- When the process is done the site is then examined to see if the standards for the new use have been met and any new work can proceed.
How bioremediation cleans contaminated soil
One of the most environmentally friendly methods contractors can use is bioremediation, which relies on fungi and micro-organisms to break down contaminants until a site is suitable for use. It can be applied through windrows, aerated biopiles or land farming.
There are three main processes. Natural attenuation relies on the ability of micro-organisms already in the ground to degrade contaminants over time. Biostimulation adds nutrients to the soil to boost the activity of those native micro-organisms. Bioaugmentation introduces micro-organisms chosen for their ability to degrade the specific contaminants, which speeds up the process.
The scale of the need is large. Millions of sites across Europe are thought to have been affected by potentially polluting activities, and research is ongoing into better ways to assess the risk contamination poses to human health, to monitor the effect of metals on soil microbes, and to judge how sustainable different remediation approaches are.