ocean pollution, destruction of rain forests, depletion of the ozone layer, indiscriminate dumping of hazardous wastes, and misuse of land and water cannot continue indefinitely, and there is no "quick fix." Who can doubt that the major contributors to the degradation of our environment are humans? Environmental problems as instigated by humans are primarily "behavioral problems" as defined by ...

Green chemistry is a tool, which when implemented right, can help the industry achieve its environmental goals. Broadly defined as the design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances, green chemis t ry a l lows companies to develop better products through sustainable processes. In this article, we will summarize the dr ivers towa...

Railroads play a key role in the transportation of hazardous materials in North America. Rail transport differs from highway transport in several aspects, an important one being that rail transport involves trains in which many railcars carrying hazardous materials travel together. By contrast to truck accidents, it is possible that a train accident may involve multiple hazardous materials cars...

In the United States, many of the millions of tons of hazardous wastes that have been produced since World War II have accumulated in sites throughout the nation. Citizen concern about the extent of this problem led Congress to establish the Superfund Program in 1980 to locate, investigate, and clean up the worst sites nationwide. Most such waste exists as a complex mixture of many substances. ...

BACKGROUND In 1992, a cargo aircraft crashed into apartment buildings in Amsterdam, killing 43 victims and destroying 266 apartments. In the aftermath there were speculations about the cause of the crash, potential exposures to hazardous materials due to the disaster and the health consequences. Starting in 2000, the Epidemiological Study Air Disaster in Amsterdam (ESADA) aimed to assess the lo...

By building on a genetic-inspired attribute-based conceptual framework for safety risk analysis, we propose a novel approach to define, model, and simulate univariate and bivariate construction safety risk at the situational level. Our fully data-driven techniques provide construction practitioners and academicians with an easy and automated way of getting valuable empirical insights from attri...

While it is imperative to remove the floating threat the obsolete vessels from the Navy and the Maritime Administration from the James River as soon as possible, it is negligent and irresponsible to increase the overall existent risk by pushing these same dangerous vessels laden with hazardous substances many thousands of miles across open ocean to foreign shores rather than carefully eliminati...

Nanotechnology encompasses an increasingly sophisticated ability to manipulate matter at the nanoscale, resulting in new materials, products and devices that demonstrate new and unusual behaviour. While emerging nanotechnologies have great potential for good, there are increasing concerns that the selfsame attributes that make them attractive will also lead to new risks to human health. Researc...

The objective of this research was to modify an extended detention basin to provide batch treatment of stormwater runoff. An automated valve/controller was developed and placed on the outlet of a detention basin in Austin, Texas, which allowed the water quality volume to be retained in the basin for a preset length of time. The influent and effluent of the modified basin were monitored for tota...

October 2011 marked the 25th Anniversary of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA), which was celebrated for its "significant role in protecting human health and the environment over the last quarter century by providing communities and emergency planners with valuable information on toxic chemical releases in their area." This Note aims to evaluate the effectiveness of ...