Abandoned and contaminated land - Environmental Deterioration and Contamination: Problems and their Management - page 77

Abandoned and contaminated land
K. Gruiz
Department of Applied Biotechnology and Food Science,
Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary
ABSTRACT
The main pollutants of contaminated land are industry, mining, waste disposal and
agriculture. Contaminated land from the past is mainly “industrially'' contaminated
and serious damage has been caused to both the environment and human health
because of the misunderstanding and mishandling of the environmental risk posed by
these industrially contaminated sites. Inherited sites and the projects dealing with them
established the scientific and practical background as well as the legal and managerial
framework of contaminated site management. In spite of cleaning up many inherited
contaminated sites, the number of potentially contaminated sites and the number of
polluting activities are continuously growing world-wide, including Europe, urging
more efficient contaminated site management.
1 DETERIORATED LAND AND CONTAMINATED SOIL:AN
INTRODUCTION
Geographically, land is a three-dimensional entity, generally of large extent, that
includes terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems as well as environmental compartments
(soil, subsurface waters, surface waters and sediment). It is the habitat of the terrestrial
ecosystem and is used by humans mainly for agricultural production and geotechnical
construction.
A site is a certain area of the land defined by its owner and its use function.
Contaminated land and contaminated site are often used as synonyms, assuming that
the owner has been identified.
Soil is the main compartment of land, including the topsoil, subsurface layers,
basic rock and groundwater, the habitat of plants, microorganisms and soil dwelling
animals.
The value of soil has been recognized again, recently. Until the recent past, - except
land for agriculture and some protected areas - soil was used as a sink for everything
to be disposed of or to isolate from other parts of the environment: digging the waste
into the ground because of the lack of organized waste collection, waste treatment and
disposal methods, concealing construction and demolition debris, desiccating wastew-
ater and slurry-form manure from animal farms and getting rid of injected gaseous