Passive samplers are environmental monitoring devices that are accumulating pollutants in adsorbing medium by diffusion. They are distinguished from active samplers which are generally required electric power to create artificial and advective movements facilitating mass transport from environment to samplers’ adsorbing parts. Passive samplers have been applied to various environmental media such as air, water, sediment, groundwater, and soil with different but could be sometimes similar purposes. They have been primarily used to measure concentrations of pollutants in both homogeneous and heterogeneous environments with high resolution in space, i.e., millimeters. They also have been used to quantify time weighted average concentrations without multiple sampling efforts at different times. Human and ecological risk assessments are also a representative example for the application of passive samplers. However, it is hard to find a case study in Korea that passive samplers have ever applied in soil and groundwater with any of those purposes. In this research, extensive literatures are reviewed to identify the utility of passive sampler application on various environmental media and diverse pollutants including VOCs, HOCs, heavy metals, and etc. Finally, the potential uses of passive sampling techniques to the area of soil and groundwater science and engineering are critically evaluated

Keywords: Passive sampler,Soil, Groundwater, Heavy metals, Organic pollutants