Remediation technologies for areas contaminated with organochlorine: A preliminary assessment of their worldwide application based on a literature review

This paper aim is to analyze the state of the art of the use of remediation technologies for areas contaminated with organochlorine based on a detailed literature review. The remediation technologies considered in this study are bioremediation, phytoremediation, nanotechnology, chemical oxidation, and thermal desorption. This survey has been undertaken as part of an ongoing project entitled Development and Validation of Technologies for Remediation of Soil and Groundwater Contaminated with Organochlorines that has been carried out by Institute for Technological Research of Sao Paulo State, Brazil. Its purpose is to identify “key problems” for each of the five technologies and also to set up a referential for comparison among them. Remediation of sites contaminated with chemical products in general is a challenge for several countries since these sites are environmental derelict areas inherited from past industrial activities. Four databases were used in the preliminary literature review: Scopus, SciELO, Web of Science, and Science Direct. The major focus of the review was concentrated on USA, China and European countries were most of both field and lab research has taken place. As part of the methodology, a survey questionnaire was designed to guide the preliminary search of information for all the five technologies. For each technology it was asked questions about publication of recent scientific papers, patents, companies that have been using a specific technology or a combination of them, and cases of application, in a way that the compilation of all these information and data could provide the research team with a state of the art of the studied technologies. After the systematization of the results obtained from this questionnaire application, since the quality of the information and data were not satisfactory, a new approach for complementing them was undertaken. For this purpose, the Web of Science was selected by the research team to be the - ost adequate database to carry out the survey.