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EVALUATION OF SOIL WASHING TECHNOLOGY: RESULTS OF BENCH SCALE EXPERIMENTS ON PETROLEUM FUELS CONTAMINATED SOILS - EPA/600/S2-91/023
Citation:
Loden, M. EVALUATION OF SOIL WASHING TECHNOLOGY: RESULTS OF BENCH SCALE EXPERIMENTS ON PETROLEUM FUELS CONTAMINATED SOILS - EPA/600/S2-91/023. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/S2-91/023, 1991.
Impact/Purpose:
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Description:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) through its Risk Reduction Engineering Laboratory's Release Control Branch has undertaken research and development efforts to address the problem of leaking underground storage tanks (USTs). Under this effort, EPA is currently evaluating soil washing technology for cleaning soil contaminated by the release of petroleum products leaking from underground storage tanks. The soil washing program evaluated the effectiveness of soil washing technology to remove petroleum products (unleaded gasoline, diesel/home heating fuel, and waste crankcase oil) from an EPA-developed synthetic soil matrix (SSM) and from actual site soils. Operating parameters such as contact time, washwater volume, rinsewater volume, washwater temperature, and effectiveness of additives were investigated. Further work was conducted to determine what effect, if any, additives have when added to washwater. The additives investigated were CitriKleen (a biodegradable degreasing agent) and an organic surfactant. Actual soils from UST sites in Ohio and New Jersey were washed using the optimum parameters derived for the SSM. The results of the optimization tests using SSM indicated that greater than 90% of petroleum products could be removed from the SSM. In experiments using actual site soils and the same washing conditions, contaminant removal was lower than it was for the SSM experiments. Although the SSM experiments achieved high removals, only 55% of the washed soil mass was recovered and a washwater containing over 20% solids was produced. The washwaters from the actual site soils experiments had less suspended solids, but it also removed fewer contaminants from the SSM.