Environmental Remediation
In the early 1990s, the strengthening of the “green movements” drew the attention of the profession – and of the public – to damage in environmental elements whose spreading effects carry further, serious hazards. Such environmental damage also occurred in groundwater and in soils. Some of it was caused by accidental events, so-called emergencies: an operational failure, a technological breakdown. Unfortunately, however, most of this contamination resulted from human negligence or even deliberate activity. The latter category includes buried barrels of galvanic sludge, chemicals, oily sludges... and the examples could go on...
Eliminating this type of contamination requires, on the one hand, technological expertise: knowing how such substances can be removed either from water or from solid-phase soil. On the other hand, specialised equipment and “specialised” working methods are needed for the cleanup operations – for the remediation. A characteristic of this work is that the appropriate technology has to be installed temporarily at a site where, in many cases, even the basic infrastructure – water, electricity, roads – is missing. This technology then has to be operated for a shorter or longer period, until the prescribed level of cleanliness is achieved. That can take a few months, but also several years.
Our company, Körte Környezettechnika Kft., gained experience in the treatment of industrial wastewater that proved highly useful in environmental remediation work. We built dozens of wastewater treatment plants for galvanic plants, surface treatment facilities, machine factories and chemical works, which gave us the opportunity to develop various treatment processes (at laboratory and occasionally at pilot scale) and to install them. As one of the first players on the Hungarian market we provided an operation service by running the systems we had built, which likewise yielded a great deal of useful information for remediation work. For the on-site – temporary – work we already had an equipment inventory linked to our “mobile sludge dewatering service”. These naturally had to be adapted to the given task, but that posed no problem either, since we have our own manufacturing capacity, capable of producing the necessary equipment.
All of this helped our company successfully bid for and win contracts in the first tenders issued within the state responsibility framework. Examples include:
- decontamination of groundwater from hydrocarbon pollution at abandoned Russian military barracks,
- elimination of contamination caused by illegally dumped galvanic sludge in floodplain areas,
- cleaning of soil contaminated with ion exchange resin,
- elimination of environmental damage at a decommissioned chemical plant, etc.
If you would like to learn more about these projects or our ongoing remediation work, or if you would like to request a quote for a new project, please contact us through one of our available channels.