Land contamination by petroleum hydrocarbons is a widespread and global
environmental pollution issue from recovery and refining of crude oil and the
ubiquitous use of hydrocarbons in industrial processes and applications. Sustainable
treatment of hydrocarbon-contaminated industrial land was considered with
reference to seven published works on contaminated railway land including the track
ballast, crude oil wastes and contaminated refinery soils. A methodology was
developed to assess the level hydrocarbon contamination of track ballast (Anderson
et al., 2000) and in Anderson et al. (2002, 2003) solvent and surfactant cleaning of
ballast was investigated and potential environmental impacts of the processes
examined. Optimisation of ex situ bioremediation of diesel-contaminated soil
(Cunningham & Philp, 2000) demonstrated the efficacy of the addition of
microorganisms (bioaugmentation) to enhance diesel biodegradation rates at field
pilot scale. This work motivated a further study that examined a novel aeration
approach incorporating ventilator turbines (cowls) for soil biopiles (Li et al., 2004).
An optimised ex situ bioremediation for crude oil wastes was developed in Kuyukina
et al. (2003) which demonstrated the efficacy of bioaugmentation and the application
of biosurfactants. The final study investigated the potential application of
biosurfactants to in situ remediation (Kuyukina et al., 2005) in laboratory soil
columns contaminated with crude oil. The collected works are informative to those
seeking to remediate hydrocarbon-contaminated industrial land and the sustainability
of the approaches was considered
