A Survey of Graduate Education in Hazardous Waste Management

A brief, informal survey questionnaire was sent to 69 universities in the U.S. Forty-two schools responded. Of the 42 respondents, 30 offered one or more courses in hazardous waste management. The average number of courses offered was 1.76 at an average frequency of once per year. Approximately 400 students take the hazardous waste management courses each year. Only four schools provided explicit laboratory training in hazardous waste analysis/treatment. Sixty-nine percent of the respondents have a research program in hazardous waste management. Typical course outlines are presented. Equipment needs for a hazardous waste laboratory are suggested.     

Spoken but not Heard: the promise of the precautionary principle for natural resource development

Too often, mining developments provide short-term jobs and taxes, and long-term environmental and community degradation. The 'precautionary principle', as practised by the European Union and increasingly by other nations, may provide an opportunity for local communities and others who bear the brunt of mining to employ a cautionary approach to mine permitting. Using the case of the Zortman-Landusky gold mine in Montana, the article illustrates how the precautionary principle might have precluded the tremendous losses suffered by the Fort Belknap residents who live near the now abandoned mine. The Native Americans and other protestors against the mine were correct in their worries about mine drainage affecting their watercourses and the precautionary principle might have limited mine development. The case also illustrates that economic data on mining companies need to go well beyond simple reclamation bond capability in order to avoid bankruptcy resulting in the neighbours and the government having to pay for clean-up.     

AN ASSESSMENT OF SEDIMENT PHOSPHORUS INACTWATION,KEZAR LAKE,NEW HAMPSHIRE1

ABSTRACT: Aluminum sulfate and sodium aluminate were utilized as sediment phosphorus inactivants to improve the water quality of a northeastern eutrophic lake. A four-year monitoring program has provided an extensive lake-database utilized to evaluate the short-and long-term effectiveness of sediment phosphorus inactivation as a lake restoration technique. An immediate impact of treatment was marked by a reduction in hypolimnetic BOD and dissolved oxygen deficit, lower chlorophyll-a and phosphorus concentrations, improved transparency, and the elimination of obnoxious blue-green phyto-plankton blooms. For two to three years after treatment, these pa-rameters continued to exhibit both less variability and improved values over the pre-treatment conditions. The improved water quality conditions warranted an upgrade of the lake trophic status from eutrophic to mesotrophic. Four years after the treatment, the mean hypolimnetic total phosphoru.s and chlorophyll-a have increased and transparency has decreased from initial post-treatment levels. Although long-term trends show water quality decreasing since the treatment, the water quality has stabilized at a level suitable for recreation. A major benefit is an increase in the average attendance at the lake by almost 2,000 people per summer.     

Interdependence with the environment: Commitment,interconnectedness, and environmental behavior

Do individuals’ perceptions of their interdependence with the natural environment affect their environmental behaviors? From the perspective of interdependence theory, we introduce a scale to measure commitment to the natural environment. In Study 1, higher levels of commitment to the environment and greater inclusion of nature in the self separately predicted higher levels of pro-environmental behavior, even when controlling for social desirability and ecological worldview. In Study 2, participants primed to experience high commitment to the environment reported greater levels of pro-environmental behavioral intentions as well as pro-environmental behavior relative to participants primed to experience low commitment to the environment. Commitment to the natural environment is a new theoretical construct that predicts environmental behavior.     

Determination of the compositional change (1999–2006) in the pine forests of British Columbia due to mountain pine beetle infestation

The current mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins) outbreak in British Columbia and Alberta is the largest recorded forest pest infestation in Canadian history. We integrate a spatial hierarchy of mountain pine beetle and forest health monitoring data, collected between 1999 and 2006, with provincial forest inventory data, and generate three information products representing 2006 forest conditions in British Columbia: cumulative percentage of pine infested by mountain pine beetle, percentage of pine uninfested, and the change in the percentage of pine on the landscape. All input data were formatted to a standardized spatial representation (1 ha minimum mapping unit), with preference given to the most detailed monitoring data available at a given location for characterizing mountain pine beetle infestation conditions. The presence or absence of mountain pine beetle attack was validated using field data (n?=?2054). The true positive rate for locations of red attack damage over all years was 92%. Classification of attack severity was validated using the Kruskal gamma statistic (γ?=?0.49). Error between the survey data and field data was explored using spatial autoregressive (SAR) models, which indicated that percentage pine and year of infestation were significant predictors of survey error at α?=?0.05. Through the integration of forest inventory and infestation survey data, the total area of pine infested is estimated to be between 2.89 and 4.14 million hectares. The generated outputs add value to existing monitoring data and provide information to support management and modeling applications.     

Identification and methionine analog tolerance of environmental bacterial isolates selected on methionine analog containing medium

Methionine is the first limiting amino acid in poultry feed. Currently, methionine supplement is synthesized from an expensive chemical process requiring hazardous chemicals. Therefore, the objectives of this study were isolation of methionine producing bacteria from environmental samples and quantification of methionine production in these isolated bacteria. MCGC medium was selected as the isolation medium for methionine-producing bacteria by using Corynebacterium glutamicum ATCC13032 and Escherichia coli ATCC23798 as the positive and negative controls, respectively. Thirty-nine bacterial strains were obtained from environmental samples. Only strains A121, A122, A151 and A181 were able to tolerate up to 0.1% (w/v) of ethionine or norleucine. These isolated strains were identified by sequencing small subunit rRNA genes. The results revealed that bacterial strains A121, A122, A151and A181 were Klebsiella species, Acinetobacter baumannii, A. baumannii and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, respectively. When methionine production in strains A121 and A181 was quantitated, strains A121 and A181 generated methionine up to 31.1 and 124.6 μg/ml, respectively.     

“Unwritten,unsaid, just known”: the role of Indigenous knowledge(s) in water planning in Australia

Water planning processes in Australia have struggled to account for Indigenous interests and rights in water, including the use of Indigenous knowledge in water management. In exploring the role of Indigenous knowledge in government-led water planning processes, how might tensions between Western scientific and Indigenous knowledges be lessened? Drawing on two case studies from northern Australia we examine how Indigenous knowledge is represented and managed as a different social knowledge to that of Western science in a management context where legal and planning conventions assume priority. The role of Indigenous (social) knowledges in developing options and strategies for sustainable water management is contingent upon the participation of Indigenous people in water planning. We suggest that water planning processes must contain the possibility of an explicit approach to mutual recognition and consequent translation of the conceptual and pragmatic bases of water management and planning in both Western scientific and Indigenous domains.     

Decolorization and degradation of dyes with mediated fenton reaction.

A mediated Fenton system has been evaluated for decolorization of several types of dyes. The result shows that the Fenton system with a dihydroxybenzoic acid (DHBA) chelator-mediator effectively reduced the color of a diluted solution of Carta Yellow RW liquid, Carta Yellow G liquid, and Cartasol Red 2GF liquid dye to a colorless level after 90 minutes of treatment with 100 microM iron II (Fe[II]), 100 microM DHBA, and 10 mM hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) at room temperature. Our results show that compared to a neat Fenton process, the mediated Fenton decolorization process increased the production, and therefore the effective longevity, of hydroxyl radical (OH) species to increase the decolorization efficiency. Our results suggest that application of this system would also result in an increase in dissolved oxygen (DO) in solution, which in turn would result in reduction of chemical oxygen demand (COD), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), and total organic carbon (TOC).     

Determination of the potential for release of mercury from combustion product amended soils: Part 1--Simulations of beneficial use

This paper describes a project that assessed the potential for mercury (Hg) release to air and water from soil amended with combustion products to simulate beneficial use. Combustion products (ash) derived from wood, sewage sludge, subbituminous coal, and a subbituminous coal-petroleum coke mixture were added to soil as agricultural supplements, soil stabilizers, and to develop low-permeability surfaces. Hg release was measured from the latter when intact and after it was broken up and mixed into the soil. Air-substrate Hg exchange was measured for all materials six times over 24 hr, providing data that reflected winter, spring, summer, and fall meteorological conditions. Dry deposition of atmospheric Hg and emission of Hg to the atmosphere were both found to be important fluxes. Measured differences in seasonal and diel (24 hr) fluxes demonstrated that to establish an annual estimate of air-substrate flux from these materials data on both of these time steps should be collected. Air-substrate exchange was highly correlated with soil and air temperature, as well as incident light. Hg releases to the atmosphere from coal and wood combustion product-amended soils to simulate an agricultural application were similar to that measured for the unamended soil, whereas releases to the air for the sludge-amended materials were higher. Hg released to soil solutions during the Synthetic Precipitation Leaching Procedure for ash-amended materials was higher than that released from soil alone. On the basis of estimates of annual releases of Hg to the air from the materials used, emissions from coal and wood ash-amended soil to simulate an agricultural application could simply be re-emission of Hg deposited by wet processes from the atmosphere; however, releases from sludge-amended materials and those generated to simulate soil stabilization and disturbed low-permeability pads include Hg indigenous to the material.