Overview of U.S. EPA and Partner Information Resources Regarding Groundwater Cleanup Technologies

摘要

National legislation first passed in the United States in 1980 creating programs to assess and cleanup sites contaminated from abandoned and on-going industrial processes, natural resource extraction industries, and urban sources of pollution such as gasoline stations and dry cleaners. It was followed by both revisions and elaboration at the federal level as well as similar legislation in most states in the years following. During the first years of these cleanup programs, efforts concentrated on the sites with the greatest risk, largely from direct exposure to drums, abandoned waste materials, large scale lagoons, spills, etc. Technologies for these problems were largely derived from classic civil engineering approaches (e.g., secure land disposal or engineered barriers) as well as available destruction technologies (i.e. incineration). As these obvious risks were controlled, the less visible contamination to groundwater rose in prominence, and existing remediation approaches (mainly pumping and treating) showed their limitations both in terms of cost and effectiveness. As U.S. EPA and others were faced with reducing costs and increasing the effectiveness of remediation of these contamination problems, they began to develop and organize cost and performance information on remediation technologies on a more real time basis. With EPA regional offices, state partners, other Federal agencies, consulting engineers and parties responsible for these contamination problems as prime "clients", EPA headquarters devoted resource to developing cost and performance information on monitoring and measurement and clean up technologies to help users. This chapter summarizes the large body of information resources.