Under anaerobic conditions, organic pollutants in wastewater are degraded by microbes producing methane and carbon dioxide. The degradation process is effective compared to the more conventional aerobic processes and produces only 5-10% of sludge. This saves considerably on cost associated with the sludge disposal. Among anaerobic technologies, the most popular ones is the upflow anaerobic slud...

Pharmaceutically active compounds (PACs) and hormones have been discovered in various wastewater, surface and ground waters, and are widely dispersed in the environment. Excretion, unrestrained drug disposal, discard of medicines and veterinary applications constitute the main pathways by which these organic pollutants reach the environment. In this study, recent research on the occurrence, ana...

The purpose of this work was to examine the settling properties of activated sludge from a sequencing batch reactor (SBR). The experiments were carried out in a bench-scale reactor, fed with wastewater from the University of Olsztyn treatment plant. Concentrations of the examined activated sludge varied between 2.5 and 6.0 kg SS m. Laboratory analyses of the sludge comprised: sludge concentrati...

A major challenge for the 21 st century will be the efficient use of all resources to minimize wastage. Lack of fresh water is becoming one of the largest and most universal of the resource problems that we face in the new century. This leads us to consider the options for turning wastewaters into useful resources, with recovery of the water for reuse. Therefore, wastewater has become an essent...

Fracture and fault zones can channel fluid flow and transmit injection-induced pore pressure changes over large distances (>km), at which seismicity is rarely suspected to be human induced. We use seismicity analysis and hydrogeological models to examine the role of seismically active faults in inducing earthquakes. We analyze a potentially injection-induced earthquake swarm with three events a...

Nitrate is often seen as an agricultural pollutant of groundwater and so is expected to be at higher concentrations in the groundwaters surrounding a city than in those beneath it. However the difference between rural and urban nitrate concentrations is often small, due to the non-agricultural sources of nitrogen that are concentrated in cities. This paper illustrates the source and significanc...

Removal of nutrients and pathogens in wastewater effluents is very important for the sustainability of the aquatic ecosystem and environment. On-site sewage treatment and disposal systems commonly referred as septic systems are one of the major sources of nutrients and pathogens in groundwater systems. Drainfields in septic tank systems are normally located in permeable, unsaturated natural soi...

[1] We measured dN signatures of macrophytes and particulate organic matter (POM) in six estuaries and three freshwater ponds of Massachusetts to assess whether the signatures could be used as indicators of the magnitude of land-derived nitrogen loads, concentration of dissolved inorganic nitrogen in the water column, and percentage of N loads contributed by wastewater disposal. The study focus...

During the summer of 1997, sediment core samples were taken at 25 stations in Santa Monica Bay. Toxicity testing was performed on 4-cm sections of the entire length of each core using purple sea urchin fertilization and amphipod survival tests. The sea urchin test identified sections as being toxic at six stations, all located near current or former Hyperion Treatment Plant (HTP) wastewater out...