Geophysical characterization of Hazardous Industrial Waste: Two examples from Sardinia (Italy)

This paper deals with the studies carried out on industrial and urban sites situated near the coast line of Sardinia (Italy). All sites represent hazardous zones for pollution of fresh aquifers, lagoons and sea water. In all areas geophysical methods have been applied in order to characterise the site and to improve the knowledge of the geometry and physical characteristics of subsoil. Many geophysical methods are useful to describe the subsoil, but mainly the electrical and electromagnetic ones. In fact, soils and groundwater are generally polluted by organic and metallic materials that can change their electrical properties. Three cases are studied using geophysical methods: a site where a plant produces alumina, a plant which produces derivatives of hydrocarbons and an abandoned urban waste-disposal site where the quantity and kind of buried material was unknown. The geophysical methods provided us with important information in all three cases, on the kind of pollutant and on the volume of subsoil involved in the pollution phenomenon .