Technological innovation for soil/sediment remediation

Abstract

Soil and sediment pollution, with an ever-increasing number of contaminants, has been a serious issue facing humankind in the current century. Rapid industrialization in all sectors, including agriculture, accompanied by radical acceptance of chemicalbased consumer products by societies over the past centuries has created the mountainous issue of contamination in our air, water, soil, and sediment. The number of contaminated sites has been rising alarmingly in many developed and developing countries impacting billions of lives. Although the awareness about soil/sediment pollution issues and strategies addressing them have evolved encompassing a wide range of guidelines and policies in various countries over the last few decades, the actions taken seem to be inadequate. Most of the currently available soil/sediment remediation technologies are expensive and beyond the economic capacity of private and public stakeholders, and the issue is acute in developing countries of the world. Therefore, innovation in cost-effective technologies for tackling the soil/sediment problem at various real-world contamination scales is an urgent need for the global scientific community. The present special issue “Technological innovation in soil/sediment pollution” compiles six selected papers covering a breath of topics on novel soil/sediment intervention strategies in order to remediate both organic and inorganic contaminants. The selected papers were presented at the “CLEAR 2018” (Contaminated Land, Ecological Assessment and Remediation) conference held in Hong Kong during 16–18 August 2018 and underwent the regular peer-review process of the Journal of Soils and Sediments. A brief introduction of the selected papers is given below: