Search results for " disposal"
showing 10 items of 1293 documents
Outdoor, indoor and personal distribution of BTEX in pregnant women from two areas in Spain - Preliminary results from the INMA project
2010
Volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are habitually found in both outdoor and indoor environments, may represent a significant health risk. In this context, pregnancy is a critical period since foetuses are more vulnerable than adults to exposure to toxic compounds. The objective of this study is to present the preliminary results of a series of measurements of outdoor (O), indoor (I) and personal exposure (P) to benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, o-xylene and m,p-xylene (BTEX) in 107 pregnant women from two areas in Spain, namely Valencia and Sabadell. BTEX samplers were installed for 48 hours both inside and outside of the women’s homes, along with personal samplers. In addition, the tes…
Long-term (1995-2018) aerosol optical depth derived using ground based AERONET and SKYNET measurements from aerosol aged-background sites
2019
Abstract We examined long-term aerosol optical depth (AOD) trends over 53 sites across the globe which comprise 49 sites from the Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) and 4 sites from the Sky radiometer Network (SKYNET) during 1995–2018. Most of these sites are located in remote and isolated aged-background regions, and few are in urban/semi-urban sites having averaged AOD ∼0.1 at 500 nm. These selected sites have a global distribution including tropical, mid-latitudes, high-latitudes and Polar regions. Among them, there are 14 high-altitude stations (∼1028–5050 m amsl), including Himalayan and Polar regions. The main objective of the present work is to evaluate the AOD trends over the aged-ba…
Low cost three-dimensional virtual model construction for remanufacturing industry
2018
Remanufactured products can save up to 80% of production and energy costs whilst generating lower CO2 emissions. The key success factors for remanufacturing are quality, lead-time and cost. Extensive work within the industry and the detailed analysis of the remanufacturing process has shown that component inspection has significant bearing on overall productivity. Remanufacturing lacks automation because activities are predominantly manual. Automation of remanufacturing process will not only decrease the number of non-remanufacturable components, through decreasing cost and increasing consistency in quality, but also attract industries to design for remanufacture. A digital model of the com…
Wastewater surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 variants in October-November 2022 in Italy: detection of XBB.1, BA.2.75 and rapid spread of the BQ.1 lineage
2023
This study adds insight regarding the occurrence and spread of SARS-CoV-2 Variants of Concern (VOCs) and Var-iants of Interest (VOIs) in Italy in October and November 2022, by testing urban wastewater collected through-out the country. A total of 332 wastewater samples were collected from 20 Italian Regions/Autonomous Provinces (APs) within the framework of national SARS-CoV-2 environmental surveillance. Of these, 164 were collected in the first week of October and 168 in the first week of November. A similar to 1600 bp fragment of the spike protein was sequenced by Sanger (for individual samples) and long-read nanopore sequencing (for pooled Region/AP samples).In October, mutations charact…
Plant invasion risk inside and outside protected areas: Propagule pressure, abiotic and biotic factors definitively matter
2023
Invasive alien species are among the main global drivers of biodiversity loss posing major challenges to nature conservation and to managers of protected areas. The present study applied a methodological framework that combined invasive Species Distribution Models, based on propagule pressure, abiotic and biotic factors for 14 invasive alien plants of Union concern in Italy, with the local interpretable model-agnostic explanation analysis aiming to map, evaluate and analyse the risk of plant invasions across the country, inside and outside the network of protected areas. Using a hierarchical invasive Species Distribution Model, we explored the combined effect of propagule pressure, abiotic …
A statistical model for predicting the inter-annual variability of birch pollen abundance in Northern and North-Eastern Europe
2018
The paper suggests a methodology for predicting next-year seasonal pollen index (SPI, a sum of daily-mean pollen concentrations) over large regions and demonstrates its performance for birch in Northern and North-Eastern Europe. A statistical model is constructed using meteorological, geophysical and biological characteristics of the previous year). A cluster analysis of multi-annual data of European Aeroallergen Network (EAN) revealed several large regions in Europe, where the observed SPI exhibits similar patterns of the multi-annual variability. We built the model for the northern cluster of stations, which covers Finland, Sweden, Baltic States, part of Belarus, and, probably, Russia and…
Carbon nanotube supported aluminum porphyrin-imidazolium bromide crosslinked copolymer
2022
The increased awareness of the catastrophic consequences caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has generated a large mobilization aimed at CO2 mitigation. Herein, in the spirit of the transformation of a waste as CO2 into value added products, we propose an efficient preparation of two different hybrid systems based on aluminum chloride tetrastyrylporphyrin (TSP-Al-Cl) and 1,4-butanediyl-3,3′-bis-1-vinylimidazolium dibromide copolymerized in the presence (MWCNT-TSP-AlCl-imi) and in absence (TSP-AlCl-imi) of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) for the CO2 utilization in the synthesis of cyclic carbonates. The so-prepared materials have been thoroughly characte…
Stimulation of sewage sludge treatment by carbon sources and bioaugmentation with a sludge-derived microbial consortium
2021
Abstract Recently, sewage sludge (SS) disposal has become one of the greatest global challenges. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the effect of faba bean straw (Straw-B), wheat straw (Straw-W), and wood-chip pellets (WCP) amended to SS, as well as bioaugmentation (BA), on the physicochemical characteristics and structure of the microbial community of the treated SS. Sixteen days of incubation of SS-containing mixtures revealed the highest efficiency of Straw-W(BA) in terms of SS stabilisation, i.e., the highest and most stable respiration intensity, the lowest ammonia emission, and the highest stimulation effect on the cress seedling growth. Shotgun sequencing data analysis showed that P…
Removal of pharmaceuticals from municipal wastewaters at laboratory scale by treatment with activated sludge and biostimulation.
2017
Abstract Municipal wastewater containing 21 pharmaceutical compounds, as well as activated sludge obtained from the aeration tank of the same wastewater treatment plant were used in lab-scale biodegradation experiments. The concentrations of pharmaceutical compounds were determined by high-performance liquid chromatography coupled to Orbitrap high-resolution mass spectrometry and ranged from 13.2 ng/L to 51.8 μg/L. Activated sludge was characterized in the terms of phylogenetic and catabolic diversity of microbial community, as well as its morphology. Proteobacteria (24.0%) represented the most abundant phylum, followed by Bacteroidetes (19.8%) and Firmicutes (13.2%). Bioaugmentation of was…
The role of nutrients in the biodegradation of 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene in liquid and soil.
2011
The widely used explosive 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene (TNT) has residues that are potentially explosive, toxic, and mutagenic. TNT and other explosives can be degraded by microorganisms; however, biostimulation is needed for process efficiency. To investigate the effectiveness of using biostimulation to degrade TNT, we added varying concentrations of a nutrient amendment consisting of inorganic salts, plant extracts, and molasses to soil and liquid media. For the inoculum we used a consortium of bacteria AM 06 that had exhibited the ability to degrade TNT and which had been previously isolated from explosives-contaminated soils. Phylogenetically, the clones clustered into seven different genera: …