Thavamani Palanisami (PhD Student)
University of South Australia

Project Title
Remediation of mixed contaminated soils with special reference to MGP sites.

Biography
Thavamani is doing his PhD in the Centre for Environmental Risk Assessment and Remediation (CERAR),UNISA. He is a CRC CARE and IPRS funded student. He has done his Bachelors in Agriculture and masters in Environmental sciences at Tamilnadu agricultural university, India. His master thesis was on ‘Evaluating textile effluent sludge as a soil ameliorant for problem soils’. Before he came to Australia he worked as a Senior Research Fellow for three years in the project entitled ‘Bioremediation of nitrate contaminated groundwater’ in INDIA. He has 5 years of exposure in Bioremediation research. Thavamani's areas of interest are Environmental Microbiology, Toxicology and Soil chemistry.

Start Date
February 2006

Project Details
Soil eco-system is subject to contamination by a variety of hazardous chemicals, such as heavy metals and toxic organic compounds. Soil is a medium of life and one of the most valuable natural resources on earth. Anthropogenic pollutants hardly occur in the environment as single constituents. Hazardous substance present even in water and air ultimately resides in soil matrix. This situation often creates a soil system which receives more than one type of contaminants called mixed contamination.

Mixed contaminant soils are the complex, multi-component systems with a range of different types of contaminants, such as PAHs, phenols, pesticides, BTEX and metals, co-existing in different physical and chemical forms. The intra and inter specific interaction and binding of mixed contaminants reduce the bioavailability and become low/unavailable to the native microbial populations. 

Previous studies showed that the focus of remediation works over the last twenty years has been single contaminants although the majority of contaminated sites contain a heterogeneous mixture of organic and inorganic contaminants. Presumably, the presence of such toxic mixture of chemicals is one reason for the lack of progress with the remediation of such contaminated sites. Manufactured Gas Plant (MGP) sites are the typical example of mixed contaminant sites. MGP sites have more than hundred species of PAHs and oxy PAHs and coexist with heavy metals such as cadmium, chromium, cyanide, arsenic and zinc etc.

This research will focus on studying the toxicity and remediation methods for mixed contaminant MGP sites.