Hazardous waste sites,stress, and neighborhood quality in USA

Summary Seven neighborhoods adjacent to hazardous waste were surveyed. The authors found that respondents did not rate their neighborhoods as highly as Americans as a whole, but, like most Americans, they did rate their present neighborhood better, or the same as, their previous one. The adjacent hazardous waste site was mentioned as distressing more often than any other neighborhood characteristic. Yet in four of the seven neighborhoods, dilapidated buildings and streets, odors and smoke from sewage treatment plants and factories, noise from trains and traffic congestion, or another neighborhood characteristic was mentioned as more stressful than the hazardous waste site. It is argued that govemment needs to be more aggressive about understanding community viewpoints before proposing multi-million dollar hazardous waste remediation plans that could be resisted by a community.Professor Michael Greenberg and Dr Dona Schneider are regular contributors to this Journal. All three authors work in the Department of Urban Studies and Community Health, and support the New Jersey Graduate Program in Public Health at Rutgers University.     

Effects of the antimicrobial agent sulfamethazine on metolachlor persistence and sorption in soil

Recent monitoring investigations have shown that antimicrobial agents used in veterinary medicine can cause non-point source contamination of soils through manure spreading. In the present study, the effect of the antimicrobial agent sulfamethazine (sulfadimidine) on degradation and sorption of the herbicide metolachlor in a sandy loam soil was studied. In soil samples treated with sulfamethazine at two concentrations (15 and 150 microg kg(-1) soil), metolachlor persistence was not different than of that observed in untreated samples. These results were supported by the absence of effects of both sulfamethazine concentration levels on the size of the culturable soil bacteria population. Equilibrating soil samples with metolachlor solutions containing equivalent sulfamethazine concentrations did not lead to any significant effects on metolachlor sorption, suggesting that, under the conditions of the present experiment, sulfamethazine did not affect metolachlor bioavailability in soil. This laboratory investigation showed that concentrations of sulfamethazine in the microg kg(-1) range did not cause significant effects on metolachlor degradation and sorption thus not affecting the main processes ruling its environmental fate in soil.     

Photochemically-assisted electrochemical degradation of landfill leachate

In this work, the treatment of landfill leachates by a photoelectrochemical procedure is reported. When applied to untreated leachates the photochemical system was significantly hindered on account of the characteristic dark coloration of the samples. At this condition the degradation process was essentially electrochemical permitting typical color and COD removal of about 50% and 20%, respectively. When a previous chemical precipitation process was applied aiming the elimination of colored species (mainly humic substances) the decolorization and COD removal was extended to 90% and 60%, respectively. Considering the extremely complex character of the leachates and its usual resistance to conventional degradation processes the result reported here attest the high potentiality of photoelectrochemical processes to remediation of recalcitrant residues.     

Extinction Dynamics in the American Marten (Martes americana)

We constructed a model of marten population dynamics and used it to investigate extinction processes across a wide range of parameter values. The model was based on rules governing the behavior and physiology of individual martens and focused on energy balance. Spatial dynamics and demographic and environmental stochasticity were incorporated. The outcome was the probability of extinction and quasiextinction (20 females remaining) over 500 years. Three qualitative forms of extinction were delineated. The first was deterministic extinction, associated with those parameter combinations leading to a negative population growth rate. The second was probabilistic extinction in systems with a strong positive growth rate but restricted population size due to habitat constraint. The transition from 100% persistence to 100% quasiextinction, as the input habitat size was decreased, was abrupt. The final form of extinction was in systems with a growth rate of approximately zero. Prey availability maintained an upper limit on these populations, but otherwise fluctuations in population size were essentially random, leading to nontrivial probabilities of extinction in even relatively large populations. A number of issues requiring further empirical research were identified. These included the relationship between habitat quality and marten reproduction, dispersal patterns and dispersal mortality, the effect of habitat edge on marten reproduction and mortality, and the characterization of the severity and frequency of catastrophic mortality as experienced by marten populations.