UTILIZED SOFTWARE

Leapfrog Works

LOCATION

Brazil

ORGANIZATION/COMPANY

Geoambiente S/A

In the late 1970s, a sprawling, 116,000-square-meter industrial complex in Brazil began manufacturing agricultural machinery and vehicles. Decades of machining, tooling, painting, and washing vehicle parts, in addition to other industrial processes, polluted the area with organochlorine and hydrocarbon contaminants. Though these plumes are affecting local aquifers used for obtaining drinking water, the full scope of contamination has never been fully understood. Geoambiente used Leapfrog to develop a hydrogeological model of the entire area, allowing them to estimate with a high degree of certainty the contaminants' sources and their total masses, as well as mapping entrapment and migration zones. With the knowledge gained from the model, the company placed absorptive barriers in areas with the highest concentration of contaminants. In just six months, Geoambiente's solution significantly reduced contaminant levels, including a complete elimination of dichloroethylene and vinyl chloride, a 99% reduction in Benzene, and a 72% reduction in trichloroethylene. The result are cleaner aquifers and safer drinking water.