Environmental problems related to heavy metals have a long history. Heavy metals have toxic properties, leading to adverse effects on human and ecosystem health even in small doses. Another problem-causing property is their non-degradability: once they enter the environment they will remain there for a long time. Metals tend to accumulate in soils and sediments, with immobilisation due only to ...

Local users are now the main source of electronic waste in Africa, but illegal imports of old computers, televisions, and other electronics devices from Europe, Asia, and North America still make their way there. That's the finding of Where Are WEEE in Africa?, a new United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report about waste electronic and electrical A large portion of these imports are of ...

The ever increasing pile-up of electronic waste in dumping sites, especially in developing countries such as China, Pakistan, India and several African countries, might have caused a significant alteration in the microbial community of the contaminated sites. This change in the microbial population may have significant impact to the soil ecology function. The major pollutants of electronic wast...

Introduction: Biomedical waste is any solid, fluid or liquid waste, including container and intermediate products, generated during diagnosis treatment in the hospitals. At same time health services may generate large quantity of wastes byproducts that need to be handled safely disposed properly. Materials Method: The descriptive study was conducted with convenience sample 50 staff nurses worki...

Field and laboratory studies were conducted to estimate concentration of potential contaminants from landfill in the underlying groundwater, leachate, and surface water. Samples collected in the vicinity of the landfill were analyzed for physiochemical parameters, organic contaminants, and toxic heavy metals. Water quality results obtained were compared from published data and reports. The resu...

In recent years, with an increase in the stringent water quality regulations due to environmental concerns, extensive research has focused on upgrading current water treatment technologies and developing more economical processes that can effectively deal with toxic and biologically refractory organic contaminants in wastewater. In this context, in order to avoid or mitigate the possible advers...

The development and application of new technologies in all spheres of life and work carries with it the ever-increasing pollution of the environment through harmful and toxic substances. Pesticides and heavy metals are among some of the more prominent pollutants of the environment. Heavy metals significantly contribute to human environment pollution due to the impossibility of their biodegradat...

Land application of contaminated waste products has been defended as beneficial use by some scientists and regulators, based on the premise that the behavior of any toxins accumulated in soils from this practice is reasonably well understood and will not have detrimental agronomic or environmental impacts into the foreseeable future. In this review, I use the case of toxic metals in sewage slud...

Discarded cigarette butts may present health risks to human infants and animals because of indiscriminate eating behaviours. Nicotine found in cigarette butts may cause vomiting and neurological toxicity; leachates of cigarette butts in aquatic environments may cause exposure to additional toxic chemicals including heavy metals, ethyl phenol and pesticide residues. This report reviews published...

In the landfills of municipal solid wastes there are a number of constituents which will leach under the influence of infiltrating water. Among the leached constituents there are also trace inorganics which are potentially hazardous to the environment, the most important being the heavy metals. It follows that the waste landfills have a high contamination potential in terms of heavy metals, bec...