Coal offers an abundant widely spread fossil energy resource. It is available at a quite stable price from many international suppliers and it will continue to play a significant role in new generating capacity, if security and diversity of supply remain fundamental. In this paper we point out the state of the art in the field of “Clean Coal Technologies” evidencing the perspectives of improvem...

Urban areas typically have a high degree of impervious surfaces— that is, roads, parking lots, rooftops, and other surfaces that impede the movement of water into the soil. In predevelopment areas with natural ground cover, over half of precipitation infiltrates the soil to replenish groundwater tables, and only a small amount (10%) remains as runoff into stormwater systems, rivers, and lakes. ...

A sensor that detects dangerous odors better than the human nose may be able to "smell" dangerous air pollutants, soil contaminants, insecticides, food pathogens, biological warfare neurotoxins, and body odors associated with illness and disease. Called "smell-seeing" by its inventors, the method relies on color changes that occur in an array of vapor-sensitive dyes in response to exposure. By ...

Floodplain soils along the river Rhine in the Netherlands show a large spatial variability in pollutant concentrations. For an accurate ecological risk characterization of the river floodplains, this heterogeneity has to be included into the ecological risk assessment. In this paper a procedure is presented that incorporates spatial components of exposure into the risk assessment by linking geo...

The poor mobility of organic pollutants in contaminated sites frequently results in slow remediation processes. Organics, especially hydrophobic compounds, are generally retained strongly in soil matrix as a result of sorption, sequestration, or even formation into non-aqueous-phase liquids and their mobility is thus greatly reduced. The objective of this study was to evaluate the feasibility o...

Sorption-desorption kinetics play a major role in transport and bioavailability of pollutants in soils. Contaminant concentration is a potentially important factor controlling kinetics. A previous paper dealt with the effect of solute concentration on fractional uptake rates of phenanthrene and pyrene from a finite aqueous source. In this study we determined the effect of initial phenanthrene s...

The use of vermicompost (humified material) for treating wastewaters, remediating polluted soils, improving agricultural productivity, protecting crop production, and developing sensitive analytical methods is reviewed here, covering the past 17 years. The main advantages of vermicompost, considering all applications covered in this paper, comprise (i) easy acquisition, (ii) low costs, (iii) st...

BACKGROUND The positive matrix factorization is a powerful environmental analysis technique which has been successfully utilized to assess air-born particulate matter source contribution. The new version of this model (PMF5) has two additional estimation error methods and some other useful advantages compared to the previous versions. In the present study, the capability of PMF5 for identificat...

The long-term accumulation of Zn in soils provides the microbial community time to adapt to this heavy metal. To assess the effects of long-term exposure to Zn on the metabolic diversity and tolerance to Zn of soil microbial community, the pollution-induced community tolerance (PICT) method, based on the Biolog microtitre plate system, was used. It especially is useful to study gradients of pol...

Animal wastes are a major contributor of nutrients and enteric microorganisms to surface water and ground water. Polyacrylamide (PAM) mixtures are an effective flocculent, and we hypothesized that they would reduce transport of microorganisms in flowing water. After waste water running at 60.0 1 min(-1) flowed over PAM + Al2(SO4)3, or PAM + CaO in furrows, total coliform bacteria (TC) and fecal...