With rapid industrial development, problems related to pollution are becoming severe Water pollution is one of the most serious problems because inorganic and organic wastes are discharged to the aquatic environment either in water soluble or insoluble forms. Heavy metal ions have lethal effects on all forms of life and these enter the food chain through the disposal of wastes in water channels...

The Mandinga Lagoon in the Mexican State of Veracruz is an important ecological zone that produces 32% of the oyster output in the state of Veracruz, the main oyster producer in Mexico. Samples of water, sediment, and oysters were collected in 2003 and 2004 to study heavy metal pollution. Metal concentrations were determined in water, soil, and oyster tissues from fresh and detoxified Crassostr...

BACKGROUND To identify adverse renal effects due to air pollution derived from a cement plant in Korea. Urinary n-acetyl-B-glucosaminidase (U-NAG) levels in residents living near a cement plant were compared to those in a group who lived farther away from the plant. METHODS From June to August 2013 and from August to November 2014, laboratory tests for U-NAG and heavy metal were conducted on ...

The prevalence of various pollutants like nitrogenous, sulphurous, phosphorous compounds, heavy metals, and organic compounds has seriously threatened the sustainability of natural ecosystems and is thus interfering with the natural biogeochemical cycling. Chemical pollution of water bodies can cause serious damage to environmental quality because many of these pollutants are extremely toxic an...

Not all heavy metals are toxic. Some at lower concentrations are essential to the physiological status of the organism. Under certain conditions, induced toxicity occurs when the heavy metals are in the form of cations which tends to bind to certain biomolecules, thus becoming toxic to organisms. In many industries, toxic heavy metals such as As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Hg, Pb and Zn, are released mainly i...

Soil microorganisms drive critical functions in plant-soil systems. As such, various microbial properties have been proposed as indicators of soil functioning, making them potentially useful in evaluating the recovery of polluted soils via phytoremediation strategies. To evaluate microbial responses to metal phytoextraction using hyperaccumulators, a microcosm experiment was carried out to stud...

Acid mine drainage (AMD) is one of the most significant environmental challenges facing the mining industry worldwide. Water infiltrating through the metal sulphide minerals, effluents of mineral processing plants and seepage from tailing dams becomes acidic and this acidic nature of the solution allows the metals to be transported in their most soluble form. The conventional treatment technolo...

We counted the numbers of pupae of two ectoparasitic flies (Protocalliphora sp. and Ornithomyia sp.) in the nests of a passerine bird, the pied flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca) to find out if their prevalence or intensity are affected by long-term environmental pollution by a copper smelter and whether such an interaction would have impacts on birds' breeding success. Fecal metal concentrations ...

There has been increasing environmental concerns on the metallic pollution in recent decades. The conventional technologies used for metal extraction are ion-exchange resins, polymer ultrafiltration and microemulsion. The whole extraction mechanism can be divided into 4 steps: 1) The binding of dissolved metal to active sites, 2) Separation of the metal load extractant from the lean phase, 3) R...

Honeybees (Apis mellifera L.) have great potential for detecting and monitoring environmental pollution, given their wide-ranging foraging behaviour. Previous studies have demonstrated that concentrations of metals in adult honeybees were significantly higher at polluted than at control locations. These studies focused at a limited range of heavy metals and highly contrasting locations, and sam...