1. General

1.1 Context

The containment technologies (materials, methods, processes) described in are, in practice, the result of more than twenty years of reflection within companies and public and private organizations in charge of polluted sites. In the course of these discussions, it became clear that entirely passive containment, based on simple permeability control, would not be compatible with all cases of pollution.

Two main phenomena stand out in particular:

• engineers' growing awareness of quantitative...