Implementing Innovation in Remediation of PFAS and Other Emerging Contaminants from Soil, Water and Air
A special issue of Pollutants (ISSN 2673-4672). This special issue belongs to the section "Emerging Pollutants".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2024 | Viewed by 2340
Special Issue Editors
2. Department of Bioengineering, University of Antwerp, 2020 Antwerp, Belgium
Interests: persistent chemicals; sanitation; circular economy; waste management; transition management
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: public decision making; law and sustainable development; environmental governance; system transitions; environmental justice
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The remediation process of persistent pollutants presents the following challenges and hurdles: measuring (the gravity of) the pollution, uncertainty regarding how to construct democratic decision-making and accountability processes, setting up the stakeholder process in order to ensure minimal external impacts of remediation activities, finding and developing the right technology (or combination of technologies) to remediate soil, water or air, and finally, finding a long term sustainable end-of-pipe solution for the pollutant.
This Special Issue will consider all of the different steps in this process, aiming to report the most recent developments and provide new insights regarding the implementation of remediation techniques for soil, water and air that contains persistent chemicals. The focus will be on perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), but we will also consider other emerging and persistent pollutants.
The following is a list of this Special Issue’s guiding questions:
- How can we improve the measuring and discovery of PFAS pollution incidents in soil, air and water, especially the most difficult measurable PFAS-chains? What are monitoring techniques and strategies to evaluate the spreading of the pollution?
- How is communication of PFAS measurement results best carried out to wider audiences and stakeholders? What are the responsibilities of measuring and communicating with wider audiences in light of providing environmental information?
- Which factors should be taken into account when deciding on potential remediation actions? How can we improve decision-making for remediation?
- How to calculate social and ecological externalities of PFAS remediation projects throughout the remediation cycle and how to take them into account for remediation decisions (including vis à vis cost calculations)?
- How to calculate the material and climate footprint of remediation actions?
- Which new technologies are developed on laboratory, demo and pilot scales for the extraction, adsorption, desorption, destruction of PFAS and persistent chemicals in soil, water and air? What is their performance and upscaling ability?
- How to build remediation ‘trains’ and combine different remediation techniques for different types of pollution?
- How can the efficiency and sustainability of existing remediation technologies be improved?
- How can the need for disposal of PFAS-loaded adsorbents be minimised?
- How to build remediation strategies for widespread PFAS pollution in marine areas and wetlands?
- How to envisage long term sustainable end-of-the-line solutions for PFAS dissolution or storage?
Contributions should consider different aspects of the implementation of remediation technologies: characterisation, monitoring, removal, processing of residues, externalities, social acceptance, communication. We encourage contributions that consider innovative aspects in the approach, application domain, implementation and decision making of the remediation process.
Prof. Dr. Karl Vrancken
Dr. Vincent Bellinkx
Dr. Leen Bastiaens
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- monitoring
- remediation
- PFAS
- persistent chemicals
- stakeholder engagement
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