| Abstract: | Soil taken from a former cattle tick dip site in NSW Australia, was remediated with a chemical leaching technology. The pre- and post-remediated soil (20g) was dispersed in water (100mL) and subjected to passive diffusion using polymeric membranes. The remediation reduced tDDT from 1174.3μg/g to 102.9μg/g (ash weight basis), which was further reduced to 43.2μg/g with composting. The membranes accumulated 41.3μg tDDT/g from the dip soil, 49.2μg tDDT/g from the chemically leached soil and 3.1μg tDDT/g from the leached composted soil. The chemical leaching removed over 90% of the tDDT, but released soil bound DDT, which was converted to DDE, while 2.99μg/g was accumulated by the membranes from dip soil, 37.52μg/g was accumulated from remediated soil. Composting, however, almost eliminated the availability for passive diffusion by the membranes from 50 – 60μg/g in remediated soil to 3–3.5μg/g in composted soil. Variability studies of the membranes using eight replicates demonstrated that the accumulation by the membranes was reproducible with an average relative error of 20.3% for p,p'-DDT in soil type two, whilst the lowest average relative error for p,p'-DDE was 4.3%, suggesting that triplicate analyses will achieve acceptable accuracy. |
