Introduction to Contaminated Site Management - Dealing with Contaminated Sites: From Theory Towards Practical Application - page 9

Fig. 1.1 The former gas works 'Delftse Wallen' in Zoetermeer, the Netherlands, around 1908,
as an example of an activity that often caused contamination of soil and groundwater (photo:
Historical Society 'Oud Soetermeer'; reproduced with permission)
of arsenic, chromium and vanadium around Tarragona, Spain, an area with an
important number of petrochemical industries).
One specific kind of contaminant sources are activities at military training facil-
ities. It generally includes a wide scale of polluting activities that might lead to
human health and ecological risks (e.g., Teaf ( 1995 ), who dealt with human health
and ecological risks at former military sites in the former Soviet Union). Another
specific type of soil contamination arises from shooting ranges where lead bullets
are deposited into the soils. In the state of Oregon, USA, for example, 211 active
firing ranges exist (Darling and Thomas 2003 ). Soils in clay pigeon shooting ranges
can also be seriously contaminated by heavy metals such as lead, antimony, nickel,
zinc, manganese and cupper (Migliorini et al. 2004 ).
In some cases human or technical failure causes soil contamination. An example
of this is a series of spilled mine tailing accidents. Since 1970, there have been 35
major mine-tailing dam failures reported (Macklin et al. 2003 ). One example of
these is the collapse of a tailing dam in the Chenzhou lead-zinc mine in China in
1985, which led to the spread of huge amounts of mining waste spills onto farmland,
followed by an emergency remediation procedure (Liu et al. 2005 ).
According to the European Environmental Agency, the most important sources
for soil contamination in Europe, as an example, are industrial production and
commercial service (41%), municipal waste treatment and disposal (15%), the oil
industry (14%), industrial waste treatment and disposal (7.3%), storage (5.4%),
power plants (3.9%), transport spills on land (2.1%), mining (1.4%), military (0.9%)
and others (8.2%) (European Environmental Agency 2007 ).
A substantial part of the existing contaminated sites in developed countries are a
legacy from the past. Today, however, it is widely recognized that the consequences