Iron Barrier Walls for Chlorinated Solvent Remediation

Over the past decade, permeable reactive barrier (PRB) technology has progressed through the conceptual, experimental and innovative stages to its current status as accepted standard practice for groundwater remediation. As represented in the schematic of Figure 16.1, a PRB can be defined as an in situ treatment zone positioned such that it passively captures a contaminant plume and removes or degrades the contaminants, discharging uncontaminated water. The recent development of PRB technology has been stimulated largely by the use of granular iron “walls” for treatment of groundwater containing chlorinated organic contaminants. While this continues to be the most common application of PRBs and is the subject of this chapter, it should be noted that many other reactive materials have been proposed and tested for removal of a wide range of groundwater contaminants (ITRC, 2005).