The Soil and Groundwater Remediation with Zero Valent Iron Nanoparticles

The rehabilitation of ports, coastal areas, polluted logistics platforms, as well as old industrial contaminated sites and respective accessibility passes by the remediation of the contaminated soils, eventually considering its reuse in future landfill construction processes or other transport infrastructures. The remediation processes usually involves a set of actions with more or less impact on the surrounding areas, but especially in mobilizing equipment, which always introduce some functional entropy in these areas. The use of nanoparticles allows remediation to a significant reduction of equipment involved, and moreover allows obtaining results in reduced periods of time. In Portugal some pilot tests recently took place, using zero-valent iron nanoparticles (nZVI), in a metal contaminated brownfield. The implementation of the in situ testing was preceded by the physical and chemical characterization of soils, groundwater and lixiviates produced by contaminated soils. The effect of different nanoparticles dosing was also tested in laboratory. This report describes the site tests procedures and resumes the obtained results, taking in consideration the unknown aspects already mentioned.