Untargeted Fingerprinting Analysis and GIS Visualization of Contaminants

Construction and re-planning of urban land call for sound and adequate evaluation of potential negative health effects caused by pollution from former land use. This demands not only reliable chemical impact assessments but also cost-effective decision-making processes, to avoid unnecessary and costly delays.

The chemical impact assessment of soil and sediment contamination is today restricted to measuring concentrations of target organic and element contaminants covered by national quality criteria. Ignoring the presence of other contaminants and their combination in complex mixtures limits the reliability of this approach, and can increase construction costs.

We want to move towards a new paradigm where fingerprinting entire contaminant profiles will allow far more sound and reliable chemical impact assessments; appropriate visualization tools for larger areas makes this increased information easily accessible to public authorities, consultants and urban developers.

We will thus focus on two deliverables: new chemical analytical technologies for fingerprinting analysis of soil and sediments and GIS software add-on for visualization to integrate currently available contaminant data and the new chemical fingerprints.

The project is a public-private partnership between university, municipality and private companies, ensuring a strong position in the value chain from research to development and implementation.