Glossary
Environmental Engineering Technician Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential environmental engineering technician terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key environmental engineering technician vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in environmental engineering technician training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Calibration
- Adjusting instruments against standards.
- Chain of custody
- Documentation that tracks samples from collection to lab.
- Field blank
- A quality control sample to detect contamination.
- Groundwater
- Water below the ground surface.
- Holding time
- Maximum time before a sample must be analyzed.
- Monitoring well
- A well used to sample groundwater.
- NPDES permit
- A Clean Water Act permit for discharges.
- Phase I ESA
- Environmental site assessment reviewing past uses.
- PID
- Photoionization detector for volatile organic compounds.
- Purging
- Removing stagnant water before sampling a well.
- Remediation
- Cleaning up contamination.
- Soil vapor extraction
- Removing contaminant vapors from soil with vacuum.
- Stormwater
- Runoff from rain and snowmelt.
- SWPPP
- Stormwater pollution prevention plan.
- VOC
- Volatile organic compound.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Environmental Engineering Technician practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Environmental Engineering Technician training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.