The use of in situ techniques in soil remediation is still rare in Finland and most other European countries due to the uncertainty of the effectiveness of the techniques especially in cold regions and also due to their potential side effects on the environment. In this study, we compared the biostimulation, chemical oxidation, and natural attenuation treatments in natural conditions and pilot scale during a 16-month experiment. A real fuel spill accident was used as a model for experiment setup and soil contamination. We found that biostimulation significantly decreased the contaminant leachate into the water, including also the non-aqueous phase liquid (NAPL). The total NAPL leachate was 19 % lower in the biostimulation treatment that in the untreated soil and 34 % lower in the biostimulation than oxidation treatment. Soil bacterial growth and community changes were first observed due to the increased carbon content via oil amendment and later due to the enhanced nutrient content via biostimulation. Overall, the most effective treatment for fresh contaminated soil was biostimulation, which enhanced the biodegradation of easily available oil in the mobile phase and consequently reduced contaminant leakage through the soil. The chemical oxidation did not enhance soil cleanup and resulted in the mobilization of contaminants. Our results suggest that biostimulation can decrease or even prevent oil migration in recently contaminated areas and can thus be considered as a potentially safe in situ treatment also in groundwater areas.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11356-016-7606-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Humic substances are not major objectives of water treatment in drinking water supply. But, as they often influence the treatment efficiency or participate in treatment reactions, their behaviour in the treatment process can significantly determine the process design. A very effective pretreatment step can be achieved by soil passage (e. g. bank filtration or slow sand filtration) which is usually involved in German surface water treatment processes. In this study transport phenomena of humic matter during underground passage are investigated with special attention to the alteration of their treatment behavior. In a fundamental work the deposition of humic substances was studied in a model system. Transport phenomena could mathematically be described by a filtration theory of colloidal transport. From the results of these calculations the collision efficiencies of humic substances on clean and coated surfaces can be derived. The humic substance deposition on subsurfaces is accompanied by a classification based on molecular weight. An additional alteration of dissolved humic matter due to microbiological degradation and partial resolvation of deposited humic matter was observed by passage of river water through columns containing actual soil. The alteration of dissolved organic matter during soil passage is finally characterized by its adsorption and chlorination precursor behaviour. All results confirm that bank filtration is an effective pretreatment step particulary due to the decrease in connection with improvement in treatability of humic matter.

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