Recent advances and current trends in innovative technologies for soil remediation

Abstract

The contamination of ecosystems may result from accidents, spills during transportation, leakage from waste disposal or storage sites, industrial activity, a misuse of pesticides in agriculture, among other causes. The potential health and environmental risks associated with soil contamination have been discussed by several authors 1-7.Therefore, it is crucial to ,preserve the soil quality and safeguard its present and future sustainability. Problems related to the cleanup of contaminated sites have evidenced the need to develop remediation technologies that are easier to implement, more effective, and applicable in a wide range of physical settings. The great complexity of the soil structure8-10 makes its remediation a complex and challenging problem. In this work is made a review of the innovative technologies for soil remediation and is given special emphasis to those that have been more recently developed, such as ultrasound-assisted supercritical extraction.