CaCu3Ti4O12, an efficient catalyst for ibuprofen removal by activation of peroxymonosulfate under visible-light irradiation

Environmental Chemistry Letters - Contamination of waters by pharmaceuticals is a major health issue. Therefore, there is a need for efficient techniques to remove pharmaceutical pollutants. Here,...     

Synthesis of a three-dimensional network sodium alginate–poly(acrylic acid)/attapulgite hydrogel with good mechanic property and reusability for efficient adsorption of Cu2+ and Pb2+

Environmental Chemistry Letters - Water pollution caused by heavy metals has dramatically impacted ecosystems in recent years. For instance, 45.4% of lakes in China are in the category of moderate...     

Conventional and non-conventional adsorbents for wastewater treatment

Environmental Chemistry Letters - The removal of contaminants from wastewaters is a major challenge in the field of water pollution. Among numerous techniques available for contaminant removal,...     

Prediction of CO2 absorption by physical solvents using a chemoinformatics-based machine learning model

Environmental Chemistry Letters - The rising atmospheric CO2 level is partly responsible for global warming. Despite numerous warnings from scientists during the past years, nations are reacting...     

Positive environmental effects of the coronavirus 2020 episode: a review

Environment, Development and Sustainability - The outbreak of COVID-19 has made a global catastrophic situation that caused 1,039,406 deaths out of 35,347,404 infections, and it will also cause...     

Anaerobic digestion and recycling of kitchen waste: a review

About 1.6 billion tons of food are wasted worldwide annually, calling for advanced methods to recycle food waste into energy and materials. Anaerobic digestion of kitchen waste allows the efficient recovery of energy, and induces low-carbon emissions. Nonetheless, digestion stability and biogas production are variables, due to dietary habits and seasonal diet variations that modify the components of kitchen waste. Another challenge is the recycling of the digestate, which could be partly solved by more efficient reactors of anaerobic digestion. Here, we review the bottlenecks of anaerobic digestion treatment of kitchen waste, with focus on components inhibition, and energy recovery from biogas slurry and residue. We provide rules for the optimal treatment of the organic fraction of kitchen waste, and guidelines to upgrade the anaerobic digestion processes. We propose a strategy using an anaerobic dynamic membrane bioreactor to improve anaerobic digestion of kitchen waste, and a model for the complete transformation and recycling of kitchen waste, based on component properties.

     

The underground industry of wastewater adulteration: how to trick legal testing with COD removers

Environmental Chemistry Letters - Adulteration is an illegal practice often committed in food and cosmetic industries, yet rarely in environmental regulation compliance. The Chinese Ministry of...     

Improved electricity production and nitrogen enrichment during the treatment of black water using manganese ore-modified anodes

Environmental Chemistry Letters - The decline of fossil fuel availability is calling for alternative energy such as electricity produced by degradation of waste in microbial fuel cells. The...     

13C-dating, the first method to calculate the relative age of molecular substance homologues in soil

This article reports the design of ¹³C-dating, the first method to calculate the relative age of molecular substance homologues occurring in fractions from the same soil sample. Soil is a major carbon pool impacting modern climate by CO₂ release and uptake. Molecular substances that sequester carbon in soils are poorly known due to the absence of methods to study molecular-level C dynamics over agricultural time scales, e.g., 0–200 years. Here, I design a method to calculate the relative age of the plant-derived C₃₁ n-alkane occurring in 6 fractions from a soil sample naturally ¹³C-labelled by maize cropping during 23 years. Soil fractions are the bulk soil extract, two humin-encapsulated fractions and three particle-size fractions. Results show that C₃₁ n-alkane homologues have relative ages ranging from −6.7 years for the humin-encapsulated homologue to +25.1 years for the 200–2,000-μm fraction homologue. Such a wide variation of 31.8 years evidences temporal pools of molecular substances in soil. This finding also reveals that physical encapsulation can strikingly change the dynamics of a single molecular substance. ¹³C-dating thus allows to assess the carbon storage potential of molecular substances from crop soils. Such knowledge will help to identify molecular compounds, associated soil pools and agricultural practices that favour carbon sequestration. ¹³C-dating is further applicable to any environmental sample containing organic matter subjected to a ¹³C isotope shift with time. ¹³C-dating will also help to study the sequestration and delayed release of chemicals in various disciplines, such as pollutants in environmental sciences, pharmaceuticals in medicine, and nutrients in food science.