Managing the Clean-Up of Polluted Sites

Christos, Chemical Engineer

I am a chemical engineer and I work in the field of environmental protection managing the cleanup of highly polluted sites.  

Because of the lack of environmental regulation in the US until the 1970s, industrial discharges caused widespread and persistent contamination in the soil, in the groundwater and in surface water bodies in the areas where industries operated.  This contamination can have serious effects on the health of people that live near these areas and it also can have adverse effects on the ecology of the area.  

It is my job, for a given site, to identify the source of contamination, to determine how it spreads in the environment and how far it has traveled from its original source (through the surface water and groundwater), to determine whether human populations could come in contact with the contamination and, if so, what are the health risks to them (also what are the risks to ecological species) and, finally, to establish a plan of action, that employs several technologies, for cleaning up the polluted site so as to reduce those risks.   

For accomplishing these goals, I use scientific and engineering principles from my own training and I also utilize the knowledge and expertise of other scientists and engineers with whom I collaborate.  In managing a project, I have the ultimate responsibility to assemble and organize all the necessary information that we gather through field tests.  We use that information to draw conclusions about the extent of the contamination and the risks that it poses to human health and the environment. In the end, it is my job to come up with a plan of action to clean up the polluted site. I select specific technologies that address the specific type of contamination that is found at a given site. I do the planning and, eventually, supervise the cleanup actions in the field to make sure that the work is executed according to the plan and that the cleanup goals are achieved.

A central part of the work that I do is communicating, in easily understood terms, to the affected community, the contamination problem, the risk that it presents, and the actions that we are taking to reduce that risk. I would venture to say that this kind of interaction with the community is one of the most satisfying elements of my job and the one that, in the end, gives meaning to all the work that I do.