In-situ technologies for groundwater treatment: the case of arsenic

Abstract

Conventional technologies for treating contaminated groundwater such as pump-and-treat systems have several disadvantages due to its high cost, especially when the operation is long lasting and it becomes impossible to decrease the concentration below the maximum allowable limit (Benner et al., 1999; Harter, 2003; Spira et al., 2006). Thus, new in-situ technologies are under development, such as bioremediation, permeable reactive barriers (PRBs), in-situ chemical oxidation, multiphase extraction, natural attenuation, electrokinetics (EK), etc. Among all these methods, PRBs are considered as the most promising ones (Bhumbla et al., 1994; Gavaskar et al., 1998; Gu et al., 1999; Sacre et al., 1997;Waybrant et al., 1998).