In recent years, worldwide attention has shifted from point source to non-point source (NPS) pollutants, particularly with regard to the pollution of surface and subsurface sources of drinking water. This is due to the widespread occurrence and potential chronic health effects of NPS pollutants. The ubiquitous nature of NPS pollutants poses a complex technical problem. The area1 extent of their...

Soils are the major terrestrial reservoir of persistent organic pollutants, and thus net volatilization from soil, when it happens, may exert a control on the atmospheric occurrence and variability of organic pollutants. Here, we report and discuss the concentrations of legacy organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) such as hexachlorobenzene (HCB), hexaclorocyclohexanes (HCH) and dichlorodiphenyltrich...

2,7-Dichlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (DCDD) was found to evaporate easily with water vapor from a heated solution. Steam distillation was also effective for the removal of DCDD from DCDD-applied soil; its concentration (250 microg/50g soil) in the original soil decreased to less than 5% after steam distillation for only 20 min. Actual dioxin-polluted soil in Tokorozawa City was partially decontaminated...

influence of soil organic matter (som) on the adsorption, desorption and transport of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (pahs) has already been given full investigation in soils. in this paper, confocal laser scanning microscope (clsm) was used to elucidate aqueous leaching of pahs in different types of soil with soil columns, which enhanced understanding on transport of pahs appreciably. four ...

Propiconazole is a chiral fungicide used in agriculture for control of many fungal diseases on a variety of crops. This use provides opportunities for pollution of soil and, subsequently, groundwater. The rate of loss of propiconazole from the water phase of two different soil-water slurries spiked with the fungicide at 50 mg/L was followed under aerobic conditions over five months; the t(1/2) ...

Sites co-contaminated with organic and metal pollutants are common and considered to be a more complex problem, as the two components often have a synergistic effect on cytotoxicity. This study investigated the dissipation mechnisms for pyrene in cadmium co-contaminated soil in which maize (ZEA MAYS L.) was grown in a greenhouse experiment. Results showed the growth response of maize may be aff...

Soils are facing new environmental stressors, such as titanium dioxide nanoparticles (TiO2-NPs). While these emerging pollutants are increasingly released into most ecosystems, including agricultural fields, their potential impacts on soil and its function remain to be investigated. Here we report the response of the microbial community of an agricultural soil exposed over 90 days to TiO2-NPs (...

The objective of this study was to develop a method for measuring the mobility of persistent organic pollutants in the solid phase of soils within the context of environmental pollution risk assessment. A new diffusive probe, purposely designed by adapting the diffusive gradient technique method, measures labile organic species by immobilizing them after diffusion through a thin deionized water...

In this review, we highlight beneficial use of microbial biofilms in remediation of environmental pollutants by bioremediation. Bioremediation is an environment friendly, cost effective, sustainable technology that utilizes microbes to decontaminate and degrade a wide variety of pollutants into less harmful products. Relative to free-floating planktonic cells, microbes existing in biofilm mode ...

Considering the serious health hazards of air pollutants from automobiles, the present study was aimed to estimate the genotoxic/tumor inducing potential of three soil samples collected from junctions of Bus stand (BS), Crystal (CT) and Railway station (RS) of Amritsar, Punjab (India) using Allium cepa root chromosomal aberration assay (AlRCAA) and potato disc tumor assay (PDTA). The genotoxic ...