The Second International Conference on Remediation of Chlorinated and Recalcitrant Compounds was held May 22-25 in Monterey, California. This meeting, which was sponsored, organized, and conducted by Battelle, has quickly grown into one of the world’s premier forums for presenting research results and case histories about dealing with difficult site remediation challenges. The 2000 Conference was attended by more than 1,450 engineers and scientists from 30 countries.

The technical program focused on work being conducted worldwide to remediate soil and groundwater contamination. More than 500 technical presentations were delivered in 55 sessions during the Conference in a variety of formats that included platform talks, poster presentations, and roundtable discussions. The objectives of the Conference were to facilitate technology transfer and to integrate recent developments in fundamental research with innovative engineering applications.

Godage Wickramanayake, conference chairman, noted that an emphasis was placed upon field applications with defensible data, which brought a “real-world” perspective to the meeting. According to Arun Gavaskar, conference co-chairman, two remediation technologies that generated considerable interest among attendees were permeable reactive barriers for treating groundwater plumes contaminated with chlorinated solvents and chemical oxidation approaches for treating DNAPL (dense aqueous-phase liquid) source zones.

Planning is under way for the Third International Conference on Remediation of Chlorinated and Recalcitrant Compounds, to be held in Monterey in May 2002. For more information, please call The Conference Group at (800) 783-6338 or send e-mail to Chlorcon@battelle.org. Information on this and other Battelle environmental remediation conferences can be found at www.battelle.org/conferences.