HSRCs Contributions to a Clean Environment

Western Region

MTBE, a gasoline additive, is not readily biodegraded.

The Western Region HSRC researchers found a fungus that degrades MTBE when grown on propane. This novel organism is being studied for its potential to break down MTBE without having to remove it from ground water.

Western Region

Trichloroethylene (TCE), the most prevalent organic groundwater contaminant, is not biodegradable.

The Western Region HSRC discovered a biological process for biodegrading TCE. The Western Region recently worked with industry to demonstrate the effectiveness of this process for cleaning up contaminated groundwater at Moffett Federal Airfield, California.

Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic Center (GLMAC)

Researchers at the GLMAC are developing new biological methods to destroy recalcitrant PCBs. They are investigating biological treatment methods that can average about $111 per cubic yard and minimize the hazardous air emission exposures encountered during dredging, transportation, and incineration of contaminated materials.

Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic Center

The processes of refining and verifying bioremediation technologies are difficult, lengthy, and costly due to problems associated with finding appropriate field sites, obtaining permits to do the work, and preparing and instrumenting the sites.

The Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Michigan and the GLMAC established a testbed for developing and demonstrating integrated in-situ bioremediation technologies. Using the Wurtsmith testbed cuts costs and time to do field testing of integrated in-situ bioremediation projects.

Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic Center

Heavily contaminated soils are expensive to excavate and treat.

In soil test at the Wurtsmith Air Force Base, the GLMAC has shown that intrinsic bioremediation or natural attentuation has a promise of environmental cleanup. Researchers estimate costs for intrinsic bioremediation of soils at fuel-spill sites to be as little as one fifth of the costs for conventional excavation and incineration or secured land filling. The potential savings at thousands of fuel spill sites ranges into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic Center and Western Region

Sites are often contaminated by heavy metals, organics, nutrients, and mixes of these three pollutants.

The Great Plains/Rocky Mountain HSRC has developed an effective process for using vegetation to clean up soil and water. Trees planted at contaminated sites take up the contaminants and retain them or convert them into harmless substances. The use of poplar trees to clean up contaminants has produced savings of from $50,000 to $100,000 per acre at municipal landfills.

South and Southwest

Explosives are in the groundwater and soils at abandoned military installations.

Researchers at the South and Southwest HSRC are learning how some plants that grow in water assimilate trinitrotoluene (TNT) in order to design systems for clean up the explosives. Phytoremediation can be used long-term for cleaning up sites and has the potential to save $20 million per site and as much as $400 million a year nationwide at DoD locations.

Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic Center

Non-native organisms used to clean up pollants in fuel contaminated sites have to compete against larger populations of native organisms.

TheGLMAC and the NSF Center for Microbial Ecology have created a protective niche for a bacterium that rapidly degrades carbon tetrachloride, a suspected carcinogen, into harmless compounds. State regulatory agencies had estimated that cleaning up Schoolcraft, Michigan, a site contaminated about 20 years ago during grain fumigation, would cost $5-6 million and take 20 years using pump and treat technology. Bioremediation at this site using the niche adjustment approach developed by GLMAC and NSF Center for Microbial Ecology (CME) is now estimated to cost $1.3 million, a savings of $4 million.

Western Region

Volatile groundwater contaminants are being brought to the surface for treatment.

Northeast

Some formations, such as clay or rock, are difficult to redimediate in situ because their structure blocks air, nutrients, additives, microbes, and other materials from reaching and acting upon the contamination.

The Northeast HSRC researchers developed pneumatic fracturing, which creates a network of cracks from air pressure. The cracks allow remediating vapors or liquids to flow readily through the formation and reach the inaccessible contaminants. The result is an increase in contaminant removal of 10 times or more, depending upon the site's geology and the level of contamination. Cost savings employing this technology range from 20 percent ($0.8 million per acre) for a moderately permeable site to 80 percent ($16 million per acre) for a site with low permeability.

Western Region

Chlorinated solvents are in the groundwater.

The Western Region HSRC is demostrating the destruction of chlorinated solvents in groundwater through catalytic dehalogenation with palladium and hydrogen.

Northeast

Soils are saturated or partially saturated with contaminated liquids and dissolved metal.

The Northeast HSRC researchers demonstrated that running an electric current through the contaminated areas allows the soil to be effectively remediated in situ. In laboratory experiments, the energy cost for removing soluble organics in clay soils using this technique was about $2 per ton of contaminant removed. Total treatment costs may be as low as $20 to $40 per ton.

Membrane Technology Enhances Surfactant Flushing

Northeast

Organic contaminateds from surfactant solutions are expensive to separate and concentrate for environmentally acceptable disposal.

The Northeast HSRC researchers have developed and tested a novel membrane technology that significantly improves the cost-effectiveness of contaminant extraction. In a comparison with conventional, commercially available membrane modules, the new module is more reliable and more cost-effective in recovering the organic contaminant.

Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic Center

Certain types of pollutants are harder to clean up because of solubility.

Research scientists at the GLMAC have developed a method that involves introducing surfactants into subsurface areas containing raw fuel and solvent liquids known as nonaqueous phase liquids (NAPLs), especially those that are more dense than water, termed DNAPLS. The surfactant-enhanced aquifer remediation (SEAR) method can save millions of dollars in energy and waste disposal costs and shorten cleanup times.

The surfactants reduce the cost of conventional pumping methods by several hundredfold.

South and Southwest

Remediated contaminated sediments may have capping possibilities.

The HSRC/South and Southwest has studied several site across the nation, including New Bedford Harbor (northeast), Manistique River and Harbor (midwest), and Seattle, Oakland, and off-shore California (west), to determine whether capping can remediate contaminated sediments at the sites.

Capping is up to 80 percent less costly than more conventional approaches, such as incineration.

South and Southwest

Polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), common petroleum-based contaminants, are found in harbors and navigational channels.

The HSRC/South and Southwest has demonstrated that commonly occurring tubifex worms that live in the sediment effectively degrade these compounds. They process 10-20 times their weight in sediments per day. Efforts are underway to understand and enhance these processes for remediating contaminated sediments.

Northeast

Current field sample collection approaches are time-consuming, inefficient, and risky.

The Northeast HSRC researchers have developed a rapid-screening techniques that are practical to use in the field and provide better, faster, cheaper field characterization data. An analytical approach being field tested will enable contaminants (such as PCBs, PAHs, and pesticides) to be analyzed in situ without requiring the collection of soil samples.

At a PCB-contaminated site in Kentucky, engineers estimated that digging up the soil would take five months. After digging for eight months, the consulting engineer estimated that cleaning up the site would take an additional five months. NHSRC researchers were engaged and used a combination of rapid screening analyses that resulted in the site being cleaned in five weeks rather than the estimated five months, for an overall cost savings of 67 percent.

Northeast

Sites contaminated with a variety of heavy metals along with the use of traditional off-site analyses causes delays and increases costs of obtaining samples. Also, it is difficult to maintain sample integrity during transportation to an off-site laboratory.

Researchers at the Northeast HSRC have developed and field demostrated an electrochemically based metals analyzer (EMA) that carry out real-time, on-site, and in-situ measurements of heavy metals in surface and groundwater at parts per billion levels. The technology uses a fabricated mercury sensor in conjunction with a highly sensitive analytical technique known as square wave anodic stripping voltammetry. These sensors can analyze a range of toxic metals at a cost of under 10 percent of traditional approaches.

South and Southwest

Chemical analyses of surface and groundwater are slow and expensive.

The HSRC/South and Southwest has supported the development of an in-situ continuous fiber-optic sensor system, termed E-SMART. The sensors will provide a detailed map of the dynamics of benzene, toulene, ethyl benzene, and xylene contaminants at very low cost compared to the more than $200 each of conventional discrete sampling.

Northeast Center, Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic Center, South and Southwest; Great Plains/Rocky Mountains; Western Region

Extensive research activities have developed solutions to environmental problems, but many of these technologies have not been adapted for practical use.

The five HSRCs expend more than 25 percent of their resources on technical assistance, training, and technology transfer to a broad base of government, industry, and community clients. The numerous HSRC training and technology transfer efforts address all levels of concern about hazardous materials and include training videos, short courses, technical briefings, workshops, research reports, technology commercialization seminars, and technology design manuals, as well as innovative use of the Internet through an award-winning World Wide Web site (http://www.hsrc.org).

The HSRCs' technology transfer effort is the Technical Outreach Services for Communities (TOSC) program (http://www.toscprogram.org). The program's researchers have helped the communities better understand issues and choices associated with remediation of contaminated sites.

South and Southwest

Assessing and regulating wastes from oil exploration and production.

Extensive acreage in the U. S. is not available for productive use because of contamination.

Brownfields Community leader often lack tools for analyzing their options for redeveloping these lands.