Search results for "WASTE"
showing 10 items of 2580 documents
Occurrence of antibiotics in the aquatic environment
1999
The recent monitoring of drug residues in the aquatic environment has gained much interest as many pharmaceutical compounds can frequently be found in sewage treatment plant (STP) effluents and river water at concentrations up to several microgram/l. This article describes the analysis of various water samples for 18 antibiotic substances, from the classes of macrolid antibiotics, sulfonamides, penicillins and tetracyclines. Samples were preconcentrated via lyophilization and quantified using HPLC-electrospray-tandem-mass spectrometry. The investigated STP effluents and surface water samples showed frequent appearance of an erythromycin degradation product, roxithromycin and sulfamethoxazol…
Wastewater constituents impact biofilm microbial community in receiving streams
2022
Microbial life in natural biofilms is dominated by prokaryotes and microscopic eukaryotes living in dense association. In stream ecosystems, microbial biofilms influence primary production, elemental cycles, food web interactions as well as water quality. Understanding how biofilm communities respond to anthropogenic impacts, such as wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) effluent, is important given the key role of biofilms in stream ecosystem function. Here, we implemented 16S and 18S rRNA gene sequencing of stream biofilms upstream (US) and downstream (DS) of WWTP effluents in four Swiss streams to test how bacterial and eukaryotic communities respond to wastewater constituents. Stream biofil…
Characterization of Hardwood Soda-AQ Lignins Precipitated from Black Liquor through Selective Acidification
2016
In the development of integrated biorefinery process alternatives to produce value-added by-products, various black liquors from sulfur-free pulping processes offer potential feedstocks for recovering their main chemical constituents, lignin and aliphatic carboxylic acids. In this study, lignin fractions were obtained from silver birch (Betula pendula) soda-anthraquinone black liquor by carbonation (pH to about 8.5) or by acidification (pH to about 2) with H2SO4 after carbonation or directly. These fractions were characterized by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), ultraviolet (UV), energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (ED XRF), and 13C nuclear magnetic resonance (13C NMR) spectroscopy. In a…
Co-digestion of sewage sludge and sterilized solid slaughterhouse waste: Methane production efficiency and process limitations
2012
The rendering product of Category 2 and 3 Animal By-Products is known as sterilized mass (SM) and it is mainly composed of fat and proteins, making it interesting substrate for anaerobic digestion. Batch and semi-continuous laboratory experiments were carried out to investigate the effect of SM addition in co-digestion with sewage sludge on methane production and possible process limitations. Results showed that SM addition in the feed mixture up to 5% (w/w), corresponding to 68.1% of the organic loading, increased methane production 5.7 times, without any indication of process inhibition. Further increase of SM addition at 7.5% (w/w) caused methane production decrease and volatile solids r…
Characterization of the contamination fingerprint of wastewater treatment plant effluents in the Henares River Basin (central Spain) based on target …
2022
The interest in contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) has increased lately due to their continued emission and potential ecotoxicological hazards. Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are generally not capable of eliminating them and are considered the main pathway for CECs to the aquatic environment. The number of CECs in WWTPs effluents is often so large that complementary approaches to the conventional target analysis need to be implemented. Within this context, multitarget quantitative analysis (162 compounds) and a suspect screening (>40,000 suspects) approaches were applied to characterize the CEC fingerprint in effluents of five WWTPs in the Henares River basin (central Spain) durin…
Co-digestion of energy crops and industrial confectionery by-products with cow manure: batch-scale and farm-scale evaluation.
2002
The possible co-digestion of energy crops and industrial confectionery by-products with cow manure was evaluated firstly, through long-term batch experiments and secondly, in a farm-scale digester. In batch assays, digestion with mesophilically digested cow manure as inoculum resulted in specific methane yields (m3 kg−1 VSadded waste) of 0.35 for grass hay (particle size <1.0 cm); 0.26 for oats (0.5 cm) and 0.21 for clover (2.0 cm) harvested at vegetative stage and 0.14 (2.0 cm) for clover harvested at flowering stage. Specific methane yields (m3 kg−1 VSadded waste) for confectionery by-products were 0.37 for chocolate, 0.39 for black candy and 0.32 for confectionery raw material. Ou…
The impact of climate change on the distribution of rural income in Ethiopia
2018
Recent evidence suggests that global climate change is likely to increase the incidence of environmental disasters, as well as the frequency of extreme weather events. As a result, it is generally recognized that climate and weather variability has negative impacts on households’ welfare relying mainly on agriculture. In Ethiopia, 95% of the population depends on rain-fed agriculture and consequently the economic impact of climate change is crucial for small-scale farmers’ food security and welfare. The objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the impact of climate change on rural households’ welfare in Ethiopia by using a Quantile Regression (QR) analysis. The main…
Disposal of green roofs: A contribution to identifying an “Allowed by legislation” end–of–life scenario and facilitating their environmental analysis
2022
The rapid and widespread deployment of green roofs requires the need to address their disposal and to assess the environmental impact of this phase of their life cycle to understand whether their current large-scale application may pose a problem. A review of the literature on green roofs environmental performance (particularly Life Cycle Assessment studies) has highlighted the lack of a standardized, commonly adopted, procedure for determining the treatments, recovery and/or disposal, to be assigned to waste from the removal of green roofs. In this regard, it should be mentioned that there is a lack of ad hoc legislation on the disposal of this technology (to the best of the authors’ knowl…
Treatment of heavy petroleum hydrocarbons polluted soil leachates by ultrafiltration and oxidation for surfactant recovery
2018
Abstract Surfactant technology can improve the remediation of soils polluted by semivolatile hydrophobic contaminants, like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), by enhancing their solubility in water. However, the recovery of surfactant from soil-leachates is critical for the economic feasibility of this treatment technology. To tackle this issue, ultrafiltration (UF) and its combination with permanganate, is reported for the selective recovery of surfactant from wastewater contaminated by a complex mixture of heavy hydrocarbons mainly composed of PAHs. The overall performance of the process including the successive steps of contaminant mobilization in leachates and surfactant recovery …
Food Waste: Treatments, Environmental Impacts, Current and Potential Uses
2021
Food waste is a major environmental and social concern, and its impact will most likely increase as the population grows [...]