The direction of the development of the industrial design gradually approaches mechanical-electrical integration and informational and electronic products. With an increasing improvement of its technical content, and better social economic conditions, people’s consumption concept are getting more and more different. Consumer concerns not just the functionality and quality of the product, more a...

New approaches should be considered as the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) moves rapidly to develop new beach monitoring guidelines by the end of 2012, as these guidelines serve as the basis by which states and territories with coasts along the oceans and Great Lakes can then develop and implement monitoring programs for recreational waters. We describe and illustrate one possible appr...

There is a widespread repeated exposure of the population to the pesticides and heavy metals of occupational and environmental origin. Such population is forced to undergo continuous stress imposed by combined exposure of the heavy metals and different classes of the pesticides used in agricultural as well as health practices. The existing reports from several workers have indicated that heavy ...

The flagship of the Environmental Protection Agency's regulatory reinvention initiative, Project XL has been touted as a regulatory blueprint for a site-specific, performance-based pollution-control system, but widespread complaints about the costs of the program beg the question of whether the costs of tailoring regulations to individual facilities are manageable. To address this question, thi...

Current chemical dispersant effectiveness tests for product selection are commonly performed with bench-scale testing apparatus. However, for the assessment of oil dispersant effectiveness under real sea state conditions, test protocols are required to have hydrodynamic conditions closer to the natural environment, including transport and dilution effects. To achieve this goal, Fisheries and Oc...

In 2004, the Atlantic Ecology Division of the US Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Research and Development began an annual winter waterfowl survey of Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay. Herein, we explore the survey data gathered from 2004 to 2011 in order to establish a benchmark understanding of our waterfowl communities and to establish a statistical framework for future environmenta...

a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Chesapeake Bay Program Office, 410 Severn Avenue, Annapolis, Maryland 21403, USA b Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, P.O. Box 28, 647 Contees Wharf Road, Edgewater, Maryland 21037-0028, USA c Virginia Institute of Marine Science, School of Marine Science, College of William and Mary, 1208 Greate Road, Gloucester Point, Virginia 23062, USA d U.S. ...

Tourism resources in the Northern Piedmont in the Qinling Mountains (NPQM) are quite abundant and play an important role in the development of the tourist industry in Shaanxi Province. Based on reviewing the status quo of ecotourism in the NPQM and existing issues, this paper puts forward countermeasures and recommendations for sustainable development of ecotourism in the NPQM. Firstly, a syste...

Wetlands provide valuable ecosystem services to society. Yet, in many parts of the world, wetlands have been degraded or lost, and demand for development—particularly from agriculture—is putting pressure on many of those that remain. Policymakers and planners have to consider a bewildering set of biophysical, economic and social factors when deciding whether or not wetlands should be developed ...

In the 1970s, there were many reports of toxic hazards at corporate subsidiaries in the developing world that were no longer tolerated in the corporations' "home" countries. Following the chemical disaster in Bhopal, India, in 1984, leading corporations then announced that they applied uniform standards of worker and environmental protection worldwide. With globalization, corporations should al...