Evidence of non-DDD pathway in the anaerobic degradation of DDT in tropical soil

Environmental Science and Pollution Research - DDT transformation to DDD in soil is the most commonly reported pathway under anaerobic conditions. A few instances of DDT conversion to products...     

Wastewater disinfection by peracetic acid: assessment of models for tracking residual measurements and inactivation.

With its potential for low (if any) disinfection byproduct formation and easy retrofit for chlorine contactors, peracetic acid (PAA) or use of PAA in combination with other disinfectant technologies may be an attractive alternative to chlorine-based disinfection. Examples of systems that might benefit from use of PAA are water reuse schemes or plants discharging to sensitive receiving water bodies. Though PAA is in use in numerous wastewater treatment plants in Europe, its chemical kinetics, microbial inactivation rates, and mode of action against microorganisms are not thoroughly understood. This paper presents results from experimental studies of PAA demand, PAA decay, and microbial inactivation, with a complementary modeling analysis. Model results are used to evaluate techniques for measurement of PAA concentration and to develop hypotheses regarding the mode of action of PAA in bacterial inactivation. Kinetic and microbial inactivation rate data were collected for typical wastewaters and may be useful for engineers in evaluating whether to convert from chlorine to PAA disinfection.     

The evolution of sustainability

Six separate but related strains of thought have emerged prominently since 1950 in discussions of such phenomena as the interrelationships among rates of population growth, resource use, and pressure on the environment. They are the ecological/carrying capacity root, the resources/environment root, the biosphere root, the critique of technology root, the no growth/slow growth root, and the ecodevelopment root.Each of these strains of thought was fully developed before the word sustainable itself was used. Many of the roots are based on fundamentally opposing assessments of the future of mankind. Many of the roots, such as the ecology/carrying capacity root, are based on physical concepts, and they exclude normative values. Others, such as the ecodevelopment root, include such values as equity, broad participation in governance, and decentralized government.When the word sustainability was first used in 1972 in the context of man's future, in a British book,Blueprint for Survival, normative concepts were prominent. This continued to be the case when the word was first used in 1974 in the United States to justify a no growth economy.Sustainability was first used in a United Nations document in 1978. Normative concepts, encapsulated in the term ecodevelopment, were prominent in the United Nations publications.After about 1978, the term sustainability began to be used not only in technological articles and reports but also in policy documents culminating in the use of the term in the report of the summit meeting of the Group of Seven in 1989.The roots of the term sustainability are so deeply embedded in fundamentally different concepts, each of which has valid claims to validity, that a search for a single definition seems futile. The existence of multiple meaning is tolerable if each analyst describes clearly what he means by sustainability.     

Utilization of a fumigated sediment by two benthic deposit-feeders:Abra alba (Mollusca: Bivalvia) andEupolymnia nebulosa (Annelida: Polychaeta)

The present study tested the utilization of dead microbial biomass by two benthic deposit-feeders:Abra alba (Wood) (Mollusca: Bivalvia) andEupolymnia nebulosa (Montagu) (Annelida: Polychaeta). Clams were collected in the Canet lagoon during spring 1989. Worms were collected in the Port-Vendres harbour during spring 1989. The¹⁴C-labelled (glutamic acid, 24 h) sediment used during the study was sterilized with 1% chloroform, washed with sterile seawater, and dried (60°C; 48 h). This sterilisation procedure, called fumigation is the least harmful to the sediment (Novitsky 1986). Both clams and worms were incubated in the presence of the fumigated sediment for 5, 10, 20, and 50 h. At the end of each experiment we recorded the radioactivity in four compartments: (1) sediment, (2) dissolved organic matter (DOM), (3) CO₂, and (4) animals. The radioactivity of the sediment was subdivided into five fractions: (i) soluble in 2N HCl, (ii) soluble in hot 5% trichloroacetic acid (TCA), (iii) soluble in 1N NaOH, (iv) soluble in hot 6N HCl, (v) residual (after combustion in a Leco carbon analyser). In the first set of experiments, after 20 h of incubation, 5.4 and 4.7% of the total radioactivity was taken up by clams and worms, respectively. However, a model revealed that this uptake could have been correlated with the release of radiolabelled DOM (33% of total radioactivity during the first 5 h). In order to test this assumption, we used the same protocol with three additional washes of the fumigated sediment. This resulted in a significantly lower uptake by the clams (1.9% of the total radioactivity byt = 50 h), whereas the worms exhibited an uptake similar to that in the initial experiment (5.1% of total radioactivity byt = 50 h). These results underline the importance of considering interactions with DOM when applying radiotracer techniques to the study of benthic food chains. The average ingestion rates of fumigated sediment byA. alba andE. nebulosa were 5.2 10^–2 mg sediment dry wt mg^–1 clam h^–1 and 3.5 10^–2 mg sediment dry wt mg^–1 worm h^–1, respectively, which is comparable to previous data reported for other deposit-feeding bivalves and polychaetes feeding on natural sediment or detritus. The low radioactivity recorded for CO₂ together with the similarity of the changes in the partitioning of the radioactivity within the sediment between control experiments and experiments carried out in the presence of clams or worms suggest low assimilation efficiencies. Therefore, the present study supports the fact that dead microbial biomass does not constitute an important food source for benthic deposit-feeders.