Infrastructural Needs in Waste Containment and Environmental Restoration

Abstract

In response to the needs in waste management and environmental restoration during the last two decades, a new service sector has emerged in the United States and across the world. Civil engineers who serve this sector have taken the responsibilities to detect, locate, characterize, and speciate soils contaminated with a myriad of species, to predict their transport and fate in order to provide design/analysis methodologies and construction methods, for containment of hazardous waste, and restoration of the sites contaminated with such waste. The tasks undertaken include development of performance assessment techniques for the designed facilities, risk-assessment methods, and recycle/reuse of the waste material in other infrastructural needs. A brief review of the characteristics of the hazardous-waste sites in the United States is followed by an outline of the infrastructural needs in characterization, fate and transport analysis, containment of waste, and remediation of soil from a review of the emerging trends and developments. The need for synergism in solving the geoenvironmental issues and the requirement for sustainable improvement of the geoenvironment dictate cross-specialization and necessitates collaboration and communication between professionals across different disciplines of engineering and sciences.