There are nearly 17,000 sites on DoD installations potentially requiring environmental cleanup. Many of these sites will require long term monitoring to ensure the protection of public health and the environment. The cost of long-term monitoring of contaminated sites is a significant and growing portion of the DoD cleanup program budget. RCRA closure sites often require elaborate and expensive monitoring. This long-term monitoring can be for process control, for performance measurement, or for compliance purposes and can last up to 30 years.
Labor costs are a significant portion of long term monitoring costs.
Long-term monitoring involves a large amount of time to collect, package, ship, and analyze samples. Waste generated by sample collection must be disposed of and chemical laboratory results can often take up to 3 months to receive in usable form. Improvements in monitoring strategies to reduce the number and frequency of wells sampled and sampling techniques to improve current field sample collection have been developed and are beginning to be exploited. New technologies to further reduce costs are required. Development of improved technologies for long term monitoring will reduce the life cycle cost of environmental cleanup and facilitate the establishment of more cost-effective and efficient remediation technologies that are protective of human health and the environment.