Cerro al Lambro site is located in the south-eastern suburbs of Milan (15 km far), not far from Milan Linate airport, near to the Milan-Bologna railway and motorway.
Cerro al Lambro Contaminated Site - area of national interest - consists of a very large area (divided in two sub-areas) on the right bank side of the Lambro river.
This river in an affluent on the left side of the Po river and crosses from north to south the urban Milan area.
In these areas, from the 1950's, at least 100.000 thousands toxical chemical hazardous waste were dumped and unlawfully stocked. Most of them were "acid mires" coming from petrochemical industry - oil refineries.
Prior to site operations, a punctually characterization campaign of the waste matrixes was carried out in order to know quantity and extension of waste, ground water contamination and soil contamination: chemical and physical analysis, hystoric, geophysic and aerophotogrammetric studies were executed.
Most of these waste filled a large natural depression (about 15.000 square meters) located in the first bottom of the Lambro river between the river bed same and the geomorphologic river slope.
In some points waste thickness is 4 meters; waste oozed out all around and contaminated:
- the first bottom nearby areas (where there are large zones of contaminated soil)
- the river bed same (where they created a sort of "consolidated acid mires peninsula").
The activities for the soil remediation started in 1999 and they are continuing nowadays, consisting in:
- urgent activities - waste removal
- preliminary site organization;
- realization of an isolating system in order to create a physical obstacle between waste and Lambro river;
- waste and contaminated soil extraction;
- waste selection and "on site" preliminary treatments (inertization and stabilization);
- waste conveyance to external disposal/recovery, in authorized sites.
- non urgent activities - contaminated soil remediation
- environmental risk assessment (using specific software) to fix Site Specific Target Level (S.S.T.L.) in order to individuate the best contaminated soil treatment system (different from conveyance to external disposal/recovery, in authorized plants.
- treatment of contaminated soil by "biopile" system.