The number and amount of man-made chemicals present in the aquatic environment has increased considerably over the past 50 years. Among these contaminants, endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) represent a significant proportion. This family of compounds interferes with normal hormonal processes through multiple molecular pathways. They represent a potential risk for human and wildlife as they ...

An Era of Hazard: Persistent Organic Pollutants By Marco A. Olsen, S.J.D. Candidate In May 2001, representatives from over 122 countries, NGOs representing citizens and the chemical industry, met in Stockholm to adopt and open for signature The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. The Convention is a legally binding treaty designed to protect human health and the environment f...

Priority pollutants constitute only a part of the large chemical pollution puzzle where the number of potentially hazardous chemicals that reaches the environment is very wide and new substances are constantly being developed and released. Among them, a diverse group of unregulated pollutants, many times called "emerging" contaminants, including pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs...

Exposures to air pollutants may offset a portion of the health benefits of walking and bicycling in cities. However, taking a detour just a block or two away from the busiest streets and roads “can make a big difference in your exposure,” says Steve Hankey, an assistant professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and coauthor of a new study in EHP. For every street block in...

The ratification of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants is a departure point for several considerations on their presence in environmental matrices. In this paper, the Italian situation is presented with emphasis on the most toxic compounds--chemicals with dioxin-like toxic action, and the activity in the area of interest of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità. Biotic, as wel...

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 ...

The rapid industrial development and agricultural growth and the indiscriminate production of pollutants have faced problems for human societies and the environment. Accumulation and pollution of heavy metals in the environment are the main important problems that as a result of human activities through extraction from ore and processing for various applications has led to the release of these ...

The introduction of pollutants into the marine environment is inevitable, so an understanding of their effects is needed. Because shallow, coastal waters are at greatest risk and many of these shorelines are sandy, a test system for the shallow, sandy, subtidal environment is required. We developed a microcosm system for this purpose and tested it for three months to determine whether the benth...

In this paper, a nonlinear dynamical model is proposed and analyzed to study the survival of biological species in a polluted environment considering the effect of environmental tax which can be used further to improve environmental quality. The environmental tax is imposed to control the emission of pollutants/toxicants only when the equilibrium concentration of pollutants go beyond its thresh...

There are several contaminants in wastewater, with organic pollutants playing the major role. Many kinds of organic compounds, such as PCBs, pesticides, herbicides, phenols, polycylic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), aliphatic and hetercyclic compounds are included in the wastewater, and industrial and agricultural production as well as the people living could be the source of organic wastewater e...