In-situ Sorbent Amendments: A New Direction in Contaminated Sediment Management

Abstract

The accumulation of harmful and persistent organic molecules in soils and sediment is a major environmental concern. Removal by physical means such as riverine, lacustrine, or marine dredging can be prohibitively difficult, expensive, and may not ultimately prove effective. An alternative is to locally change the geochemistry to stabilize and sequester the contaminants and render them biologically unavailable. Ghosh et al. report on pilot projects to determine whether activated carbon would be so useful. Their Feature concludes with what more needs to be done to minimize anthropogenic chemical blights in soil and sediments.

Effects of Fe2+ and Fe3+ ratio impregnated onto local commercial activated carbon coconut shell powder on the dye removal efficiency

“…Activated carbon (AC) produced from biomass waste has been extensively used for sorbent material, for example in water treatment (Orha et al, 2016), soil decontamination (Vasilyeva et al, 2010), purification of air (Nam et al, 2018), remediation of marine sediment (Samuelsson et al, 2015) and sediment management (Ghosh et al, 2011). AC has also been used for the removal of dye wastewaters (Chandra et al, 2007;Regti et al, 2017;Hameed et al, 2017;Kumar et al, 2018).…”

“…However, performance of this method depends on the characteristic of the wastewater and the origin of the AC applied (Robinson et al, 2001). Powdered AC has better sorption kinetic properties than that of granular AC (Ghosh et al, 2011). On the other hand, separation of the powdered AC from solution or slurries cannot be easily realized with conventional clarification processes (Han et al, 2015).…”

Active carbons from waste biochars

“…It is assumed that they can be used, among others, for remediation of contaminated soils, sequestration of carbon in soil, improvement of composting conditions, improvement of soil properties, and removal of impurities from soils as well as underground and surface waters [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11].…”

Extraction of sediment‐associated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons with granular activated carbon

“…Over the last decade, in situ addition of activated carbon (AC) to polluted sediments has been proposed as an effective remediation strategy to reduce risks of sediment-bound HOCs and to improve the ecological quality of surface waters [1,2]. Sediment remediation with AC has been shown to result in reduced freely dissolved HOC concentrations in sediment porewater in laboratory and field settings [3][4][5][6][7] and in reduced bioaccumulation and toxicity of HOCs in benthic invertebrates [5,6,8].…”