In the region of the Apuseni Mountains, part of the Western Carpathians in Romania, metal mining activities have a long-standing tradition. These mining industries created a clearly beneficial economic development in the region. But their activities also caused impairments to the environment, such as acid mine drainage (AMD) resulting in long-lasting heavy metal pollution of waters and sediments. The study, established in the context of the ESTROM programme, investigated the impact of metal mining activities both from environmental and socioeconomic perspectives and tried to incorporate the results of the two approaches into an integrated proposition for mitigation of mining-related issues.
Study site
The small Certej catchment, situated in the Southern Apuseni Mountains, covers an area of 78 km2. About 4,500 inhabitants are living in the basin, in which metal mining was the main economic sector. An open pit and several abandoned underground mines are producing heavy metal-loaded acidic water that is discharged untreated into the main river. The solid wastes of mineral processing plants were deposited in several dumps and tailings impoundment embodying the acidic water-producing mineral pyrite.
Methods
The natural science team collected samples from surface waters, drinking water from dug wells and from groundwater. Filtered and total heavy metals, both after enrichment, and major cations were analysed by inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES). Major anions in waters, measured by ion chromatography, alkalinity and acidity were determined by titration. Solid samples were taken from river sediments and from the largest tailings dam. The latter were characterised by X-ray fluorescence and X-ray diffraction. Heavy metals in sediments were analysed after digestion. Simultaneously, the socioeconomic team performed a household survey to evaluate the perception of people related to the river and drinking water pollution by way of a logistic regression analysis.
Results and discussion
The inputs of acid mine waters drastically increased filtered heavy metal concentrations in the Certej River, e.g. Zn up to 130 mg L−1, Fe 100 mg L−1, Cu 2.9 mg L−1, Cd 1.4 mgL−1 as well as those of SO4 up to 2.2 g L−1. In addition, river water became acidic with pH values of pH 3. Concentrations of pollutant decreased slightly downstream due to dilution by waters from tributaries. Metal concentrations measured at headwater stations reflect background values. They fell in the range of the environmental quality standards proposed in the EU Water Framework Directive for dissolved heavy metals. The outflow of the large tailing impoundment and the groundwater downstream from two tailings dams exhibited the first sign of AMD, but they still had alkalinity.
Most dug wells analysed delivered a drinking water that exhibited no sign of AMD pollution, although these wells were a distance of 7 to 25 m from the contaminated river. It seems that the Certej River does not infiltrate significantly into the groundwater.
Pyrite was identified as the main sulphide mineral in the tailings dam that produces acidity and with calcite representing the AMD-neutralising mineral. The acid–base accounting proved that the potential acid-neutralising capacity in the solid phases would not be sufficient to prevent the production of acidic water in the future. Therefore, the open pits and mine waste deposits have to be seen as the sources for AMD at the present time, with a high long-term potential to produce even more AMD in the future.
The socioeconomic study showed that mining provided the major source of income. Over 45% of the households were partly or completely reliant on financial compensations as a result of mine closure. Unemployment was considered by the majority of the interviewed persons as the main cause of social problems in the area. The estimation of the explanatory factors by the logistic regression analysis revealed that education, household income, pollution conditions during the last years and familiarity with environmental problems were the main predictors influencing peoples’ opinion concerning whether the main river is strongly polluted. This model enabled one to predict correctly 77% of the observations reported. For the drinking water quality model, three predictors were relevant and they explained 66% of the observations.
Conclusions
Coupling the findings from the natural science and socioeconomic approaches, we may conclude that the impact of mining on the Certej River water is high, while drinking water in wells is not significantly affected. The perceptions of the respondents to pollution were to a large extent consistent with the measured results.
Recommendations and perspectives
The results of the study can be used by various stakeholders, mainly the mining company and local municipalities, in order to integrate them in their post-mining measures, thereby making them aware of the potential long-term impact of mining on the environment and on human health as well as on the local economy.
Background, aim, and scope Endosulfan, an organochlorine pesticide (OCP), is genotoxic in mammalian cells and generally considered to be toxic and classified
by the World Health Organization and the US Environmental Protection Agency as priority pollutants and a nominator for inclusion
in a future iteration of the persistent organic pollutants treaty. Endosulfan is a currently used pesticide and still being
used worldwide. The general trend of total global endosulfan use has increased continuously since the first year when this
pesticide was applied. It is critical to create national endosulfan usage/emission inventories for China to carry out source–receptor
relation analysis, risk assessment, and other research related to endosulfan in this country. Chinese inventories have been
published for some OCPs, such as technical HCH and lindane, DDT, and chlordane; for endosulfan, however, there has not been
any usage inventory available on any scales (national or provincial), although endosulfan has been widely used since 1994
in this country. This is the first part of the work. The goal of this paper is to quantify the historical production and usage
of endosulfan in China and to compile gridded historical usage inventories of endosulfan for this country. Based on these
usage inventories, emission and residue inventories will be created, which is the goal of the second part of the work.
Materials and methods Due to the lack of national production and usage information of endosulfan in China, a method to estimate the use of endosulfan
was developed. First, information of crops on which endosulfan is applied and average endosulfan use and annual application
frequencies of endosulfan on these crops were collected. Secondly, usage of endosulfan on each crop was estimated using the
national cropland area for each province from Chinese government reports. Finally, with the help of GIS (geographic information
system), the usage data of this insecticide was allocated to a grid system, with a 1/4° longitude by 1/6° latitude resolution,
with a size for each grid cell of approximately 25 km by 25 km.
Results and discussion The use of endosulfan in agriculture in China started on cotton in 1994, and on wheat, tea, tobacco, apples, and other fruits
in 1998. Endosulfan usage on cotton, wheat, tea, tobacco, and apples in China has been estimated to be approximately 25,700 t
between 1994 and 2004. The province with the highest usage of endosulfan is Henan Province, with a total usage reaching 4,000 t,
followed by the uses in Xinjiang Autonomous Region (3,200 t), Shandong Province (3,000 t), Hebei Province (2,100 t), and Anhui
Province (1,900 t). Gridded usage inventories of endosulfan at a 1/4° longitude by 1/6° latitude resolution have been created,
which indicate that the intensive endosulfan use was in the south of Hebei Province, west of Shandong Province, east of Henan
Province, north of Anhui Province, east of Jiangsu Province, and some areas in Yunnan Province and Xinjiang Autonomous Region.
General agreement has been found between the usage data from our estimation and the small amount of usage data published in
China.
Conclusions This is the first national gridded endosulfan usage inventory produced for China. The annual applications of endosulfan from
1994 to 2004 in China were estimated based on the total areas of major crops, on which endosulfan was applied, and spatial
distribution of the application was generated at provincial and prefecture levels. With the help of GIS, endosulfan usage
based on prefecture was transferred to a 1/4° longitude by 1/6° latitude gridding system. The satisfaction of the inventories
was supported by the consistence between the estimation of the annual usage and the reported annual production of endosulfan.
Recommendations and perspectives This gridded endosulfan usage inventory created in this study will be improved upon availability of new information of endosulfan.
The usage inventories can be used to create gridded emission and residue inventories for this insecticide. It is believed
that this work will pave the way for further endosulfan studies in China and beyond. 相似文献
This paper discusses about the quantitative effect of windbreak fences on wind velocity in the reclaimed land at Saemangeum in South Korea. Windbreak fences were constructed in the reclaimed land to reduce the wind velocity to prevent the generation and diffusion of dust. However, up to this time, no in-depth studies were conducted to quantitatively measure the effect of the windbreak fences on wind velocity thus an optimum windbreak structure is not yet determined. Using CFD simulations, the effects of fence porosity, fence height, and the distance between the adjacent fences were investigated. A wind tunnel experiment was initially conducted and data gathered were used to develop the CFD models. From the experiments and CFD simulations, the overall percentage difference of the measured velocities was 7.20% which is generally acceptable to establishing the reliability of the CFD models. The reduction effect on wind velocity was measured in between the adjacent fences up to a height of 0.6 m from the ground surface. In terms of porosity ( = 0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6), 0.2 was found to be the optimum value. Conversely, the effect of fence height (0.6, 0.8 and 1.0 m) showed no significant difference; therefore, 0.6 m height is recommended. In addition, the reduction effect of distance between the adjacent fences (2, 4 and 6 m) on wind velocity having a 0.2 porosity has decreased to about 75% regardless of the distance. In the case of the reclaimed land in Saemangeum, a decrease of 75% can prevent the generation and diffusion of dusts. However, the source of dusts is very large. Therefore, constructing an array of windbreak with 6 m distance between them is deemed necessary. 相似文献
Oxalic acid in individual aerosol particles was measured using single particle aerosol time-of-flight mass spectrometry (ATOFMS) in the summer of 2007 in Shanghai, China. Oxalate was found in 3.4% of total particles with diameters in the range of 0.2 – 2.0 μm. Size, chemical composition and hourly temporal counts of single particles that contained oxalic acid were measured. The predominant types of oxalate-containing particles were characterized to distinguish the primary and secondary sources of oxalic acid. Biomass burning was revealed as a major primary source of oxalic acid which contributed more than 20% of the oxalate-containing particles. Evidences for two different formation pathways of oxalic acid were observed in our experiment. The number fraction of oxalate-containing particles correlated with that of sulfate particles and the changes of air parcel backward trajectories, suggesting that in-cloud processing played important roles in oxalic acid formation. The diurnal patterns of dust and sea salt particle counts fitted well with the ambient relative humidity variation, suggesting that heterogeneous reactions occurring in hydrated/deliquesced aerosols also contributed to the production of oxalic acid. 相似文献
Formaldehyde and acetaldehyde are two most abundant carbonyls in ambient air. Biogenic emission has been proposed as a significant source other than anthropogenic emissions and atmospheric secondary formation. Here at a forest site in South China, the carbon isotopic compositions of formaldehyde and acetaldehyde emitted from leaves of three tree species (Litsea rotundifolia, Canarium album and Castanea henryi) were measured in comparison with the bulk carbon isotopic compositions of tree leaves. δ13C data of the emitted aldehydes (from ?31‰ to ?46‰) were quite different for tree species, which were all more depleted in 13C than the tree-leaf bulk δ13C values (from ?27‰ to ?32‰). Formaldehyde in ambient air at the forest site had δ13C values different from those of leaf-emitted formaldehyde, indicating other sources for ambient formaldehyde apart from direct emission from leaves, most probably the photooxidation of biogenic hydrocarbon like isoprene and monoterpene. The δ13C differences of acetaldehyde between ambient data and those of tree leaves emission were less than 1‰, implying direct biogenic emission as the dominant source. 相似文献