Soil and groundwater pollution: advancements in techniques for characterisation, remediation, and monitoring

This chapter presents an overview of the technological innovations currently available for the characterisation, remediation, and monitoring of soil and groundwater pollution. The first part provides the basic elements of the impact of soil and groundwater pollution, by describing the multiple correlated aspects involved, ranging from the types of contaminants, sources, and effects together with the transport processes. These control the criteria and techniques, now widely developed and increasingly cutting-edge, which are necessary to quantitatively define the contamination problem, through site characterisation, plan remediation interventions, and monitoring. The second section of the chapter describes the technological and methodological innovations for subsoil investigations, hydro-geo-chemical characterisation of both the subsurface environmental matrices and storage, together with a description of data management, processing, and visualisation. It is also described how these provide significant tools for the integrated management of large amounts of multisource data, and modelling, which are the basis of the conceptual site model development and the implementation of effective and sustainable interventions. The last part of the chapter summarises existing and more recent innovative developments for soil and groundwater remediation. A dedicated section indicates the available criteria for designing and implementing effective interventions in relation to the chemical and geo-environmental contexts.