1. Soil pollution and industrial sites

1.1 Soil, a non-renewable resource

Soil in the pedological sense is defined as the top layer of the earth's surface, resulting from the alteration of parent rock under the influence of climate, biological activity and vegetation [7][8] . It is a compartment of ecosystems, performing functions essential to life. Playing the roles of sink and source in biogeochemical cycles, it exerts a decisive influence on air and water quality. Soil appears to be a non-renewable resource, as the time scale of degradation processes is extremely short (a few years or decades) compared with that of formation processes (several millennia).

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