In recent years environmental concerns about subsurface contamination has been pointed out among various fields. Dowa mining CO. Ltd., which opened up mines in the north part of Akita pref. since 1884, has been forced to turn its business field from mining to some other applications because of being weakened its competitive power of mining in the world market. One of the applications for the environmental field started up in 1987 with waste management and metal recycling using the existing facilities and skills of mineral processing and smelting in our company. Around 1990s, as our company has been recognized as providing proper management for all kinds of wastes and reducing environmental risks with highly experienced skills, social demands for treating soils contaminated with heavy metals, volatile organic compounds or petroleum hydrocarbons as wastes have strongly risen up against our company.
In order to respond to those demands, our company has introduced a new concept of "soil remediation" divide the treatment of contaminated soils from waste management. This concept was easily accepted and many kinds of the applications for the remediation were made into practice because our company has contributed to the development of subsurface materials and protection for environmental matters. Thus by applying mining facilities and skills into the new business field of soil remediation, we could accomplish the establishment of this field along with the existing technologies of mining and waste management. In our company soil remediation business can be started with subsurface investigation which is the applied technology of mine probes following to the remediation with our mining concept and technologies including incineration, bioremediation, soil washing, and chemical treatment. Based on the mining technologies described above, we could establish the overall site assessment to treat contaminated soils as “soils” properly.
