Petroleum contaminated soils in highway construction

There are between 0.8 to 1.2 million leaking underground storage tanks (USTs) in US. In 1984 US Congress added Subtitle I to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) to regulate leaking USTs. Now almost all the fifty states require removal and proper disposal of petroleum contaminated soils (PCSs) to prevent further contamination of groundwater. Excavated PCSs are disposed using one of the following methods: disposed in Landfills; used for bioremediation and low temperature desorption; and reused in highway industry as construction materials. Ezeldin et al., 1992 proposed the use of PCSs as sand replacement in the production of structural concrete for use in non-residential construction, i.e., in the construction of highways, parking lots, sidewalks, etc. Meegoda et al., 1992 proposed the use of PCSs as aggregate replacement in the production of hot mix asphalt concrete. PCSs were also used as sub base material by compacting to specifications and subsequently covering them with a nearly impermeable asphalt concrete or regular concrete layer to prevent leaching of petroleum products to the groundwater (Meegoda et al., 1994). The cost/benefit, engineering, and environmental aspects of reuse of PCSs in highway industry as a construction material is discussed in this paper.