AbstractContaminated site clean‐up in the Federal Republic of Germany. Contaminated site clean‐up will be one of the most extensive and expensive tasks of coming decades. The present contribution first surveys the different views of what constitutes a contaminated site, as held by different authors and different government agencies. The extent of such contamination is then estimated and various processes for its disposal presented. The various clean‐up methods are compared from a technical and a financial standpoint. The state of the art and those areas in which research is called for are indicated.