Development of a Diagnostic System for Soil and Groundwater Contamination and its Application to the Inappropriate Storage Sites

A recent serious environmental issue has been soil and groundwater contamination caused by waste materials. However in actuality, many local governments in Japan are experiencing trouble with development of plans to restore contaminated sites, because they have no methodology. Therefore, establishment of a methodology and procedure for investigation and remediation of contaminated sites is required. In this paper, 1) we proposed a flowchart of countermeasures for soil and groundwater contamination caused by waste materials in Japan ; 2) we introduced scoping into the countermeasures and showed the importance of developing a plan of basic remedial strategies ; and 3) we developed a diagnostic system that supported the development of an investigation plan, futhermore, by applying the diagnostic system to an actual inappropriate storage site, we proposed some remedial alternatives for contaminated sites, and we showed that the data management system with the Geographic Information System (GIS), which was part of the diagnostic system, was a very effective tool in planning the basic remedial strategies.