For more than a decade, the primary focus of environmental experts has been to adopt
risk-based management approaches to cleanup PAH polluted sites that pose potentially
destructive ecological consequences. This focus had led to the development of several
physical, chemical, thermal and biological technologies that are widely implementable.
Established remedial options available for treating PAH contaminated soils are incineration,
thermal conduction, solvent extraction/soil washing, chemical oxidation, bioaugmentation,
biostimulation, phytoremediation, composting/biopiles and bioreactors. Integrating
physico-chemical and biological technologies is also widely practiced for better cleanup
of PAH contaminated soils. Electrokinetic remediation, vermiremediation and biocatalyst
assisted remediation are still at the development stage. Though several treatment
methods to remediate PAH polluted soils currently exist, a comprehensive overview
of all the available remediation technologies to date is necessary so that the right
technology for field-level success is chosen. The objective of this review is to provide
a critical overview in this respect, focusing only on the treatment options available
for field soils and ignoring the spiked ones. The authors also propose the development
of novel multifunctional green and sustainable systems like mixed cell culture system,
biosurfactant flushing, transgenic approaches and nanoremediation in order to overcome
the existing soil- contaminant- and microbial-associated technological limitations
in tackling high molecular weight PAHs. The ultimate objective is to ensure the successful
remediation of long-term PAH contaminated soils.