There are 1.9 hectares of productive land available for each of the 6 billion people living in the world at present. In our industrialised Western society it is sometimes hard to realise quite how fundamental land is to our life on earth. The top six inches of land, which is soil, has to provide us with all our food. The land has to absorb much of our waste and is the catchment and filter for o...

In the continuing transformation of U.S. agriculture, North Carolina finds itself on the front edge of change. Between 1989 and 1998, the number of hogs in the state's pork industry quintupled---and so has the amount of hog waste that must be disposed of. Now the state has engaged private and public resources in a rapid search for better ways for handling hog waste. A technology review panel ha...

—Worldwide, rice (Oryza sativa) agriculture typically involves seasonal flooding and soil tillage, which provides a variety of microhabitats and potential food for birds. Water management in rice fields creates conditions ranging from saturated mud flats to shallow (<30 cm) water, thereby attracting different guilds of birds. Grain not collected during harvest (i.e. waste rice) is typically the...

Environmental protection has the foremost importance in the present day life of mankind. Scientists have been researching for technologies naturally available for enhancement of agriculture, management of agricultural waste, etc. Indigenous Microorganisms (IMO's)-based technology is one such great technology which is applied in the eastern part of world for the extraction of minerals, enhanceme...

1. Applications include (inter alia) renewable biofuels, pharmaceuticals, technical materials, nuclear waste disposal, chemical detoxification, superefficient agriculture, energy harvesting and conversion, and geoengineering. Creating a so-called ‘minimal microbe’ template could streamline the design of biological systems or their components, which could then be engineered for a host of special...

Considerable debate exists over the primary cause of increased antibiotic resistance (AR) worldwide. Evidence suggests increasing AR results from overuse of antibiotics in medicine and therapeutic and nontherapeutic applications in agriculture. However, pollution also can influence environmental AR, particularly associated with heavy metal, pharmaceutical, and other waste releases, although the...

India produces around 3000 million tones of organic waste annually. This huge volume of waste(s) comes from agriculture, urban and industrial sources and also from domestic activities. Utilization of this waste material for productivity process is important for both economical and environmental reasons. In the present study an effort has been made to asses the efficacy of E. foetida (red tiger ...

The accelerated growth of the global urban population implies an increasing demand for public services. Yet, urban centres in developing countries are unable to meet such demand – services such as sanitation are poor or inadequate to cope with the increasing rates of urbanisation and the associated higher standards of living. According to the UN 2002 Human Development Report, 2.4 billion people...

The use of different agricultural or industrial wastes is an important component of sustainable agriculture in order to close nutrient cycles on a global, regional and local scale. Farmyard manure or slurry are established as fertilizers in agricultural or horticultural production and substitute mineral fertilizers. Due to the lower nutrient use efficiency compared with mineral fertilizers, esp...

The abysmal state of and challenges in municipal solid waste management (MSWM) in urban India is the motivation of the present study. Urbanization contributes enhanced municipal solid waste (MSW) generation and unscientific handling of MSW degrades the urban environment and causes health hazards. In this paper, an attempt is made to evaluate the major parameters of MSWM, in addition to a compre...