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Toxic waste spills in Côte d’Ivoire : follow-up of the effectiveness of the cleanup operation according to residual pollution indicators Volume 17, issue 2, March-April 2018

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Authors
1 Université Jean Lorougnon Guédé
UFR environnement
Département des sciences de la terre
BP 150 Daloa
Côte d’Ivoire
2 Université Nangui Abrogoua
UFR SGE
Laboratoire des sciences de l’environnement
02 BP 801 Abidjan 02
Côte d’Ivoire
3 Université Félix Houphouët Boigny
UFR SRTM
Département des sciences et techniques de l’eau et du génie de l’environnement (DSTEGE)
22 BP 582 Abidjan 22
Côte d’Ivoire
* Tirés à part

After toxic waste spills in Abidjan in 2006, a company was commissioned by the Ivorian government to clean up contaminated sites. The objective of this study is to verify the effectiveness of the cleanup methods and techniques used by this operator, with tracer pollutants that we identified in previous studies (sulfur and chlorine). Of these two tracer pollutants, the company considered only sulfur sufficiently relevant, in terms of persistence and health risks. However, since the composition of the waste is not fully known, exhaustive and targeted search for any one substance was not feasible. To offset this difficulty, the operator measured the total hydrocarbon concentration in the residual soil in addition to the sulfur content. The concentrations obtained from our analyses were compared to those of the pedologically identical control samples, taken sufficiently far from the spill sites. The residual pollution concentrations obtained are all in the same order of magnitude as the background geochemical values in the anthropogenic soil (<100 ppm for total hydrocarbons and < 1 ppm for sulfur). These concentrations reflect the effectiveness of the decontamination methods and techniques used by the operator.

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