“…Satisfactory decontamination yields have been obtained with this technique on a variety of hydrocarbons polluted soils; in the most of the cases aqueous solutions of commercial synthetic surfactants have been applied at concentrations well above their critical micelle concentrations (CMCs; Chang et al, 2000;Cheah et al, 1998;Chu and So, 2001;Deshpande et al, 1999;Mulligan et al, 2001;Saxe et al, 2000;Urum and Pekdmir, 2004). In general synthetic chemical surfactants were found to persist and exert toxic effects both in the soil resulting from washing (Berselli et al, 2004(Berselli et al, , 2006Christofi and Ivshina, 2002;Rouse et al, 1994;Volkering et al, 1998;Wong JW et al, 2004) and in the resulting aqueous effluents (Berselli et al, 2004(Berselli et al, , 2006. This limitation of conventional soil washing procedure can be mitigated by replacing synthetic surfactants with biogenic pollutant mobilizing agents able to provide marked pollutant mobilization activity along with complete biodegradability and none toxicity (Christofi and Ivshina, 2002;Rouse et al, 1994;Volkering et al, 1998).…”