inorganic and organic compounds, primarily as a result of human activities. While inorganic pollutants occur as natural elements in the Earth’s crust and atmosphere, human activities such as industry, mining, motorized traffic, agriculture, logging, and military actions promote their release and concentration in the environment, leading to toxicity (Nriagu 1979). Organic pollutants in the envir...

Industrial development has created a serious problem by emitting waste water containing many different kinds of pollutants including heavy metals. There are several chemical and physical processes for heavy metals removal but bioremediation technology has also good prospect. As the waste water from different industries is deposited in the rivers nearby so aquatic flora are needed to be studied ...

Ferrate (VI) exhibits many advantages because of its dual functions of oxidation and coagulation. Removal of micro pollutants by ferrate(VI) was pH dependant and this was in coordinate to the chemical/physical properties of the pollutants and ferrate(VI) speciation. Promising performance of ferrate(VI) in the treatment of real waste water was observed. It is important to determine whether the f...

The European water framework directive (WFD; Directive 2000/60/EC) develops the concept of ecological quality status (EcoQ) for the assessment of the quality of water masses. The EcoQ is based upon the status of biological, hydromorphological and physicochemical quality elements, with biological elements being especially important; and supported by the others. The physico-chemical elements incl...

BACKGROUND Pharmaceuticals and their metabolites are inevitably emitted into the waters. The adverse environmental and human health effects of pharmaceutical residues in water could take place under a very low concentration range; from several µg/L to ng/L. These are challenges to the global water industries as there is no unit process specifically designed to remove these pollutants. An effici...

Water is a renewable resource but yet finite. Its sustainable usage and the maintenance of a good quality are essential for an intact environment, human life and a stable economy. Emerging technologies aim for a continuous monitoring of water quality, overcoming periodic analytical sampling, and providing information on the current state of inshore waters in real time. So does the here presente...

1 Environmental Processes and Water Technology Research Unit, Department of Environmental Science and Technology, Imperial College, London, London SW7 2AZ, England. Correspondence should be sent to Dr Voulvoulis at this address (email: [email protected]). Ref. No. 03-006189 For much of the last thirty years, research on the effects of chemical pollution of the environment has focused ...

The acquisition of sensory information by animals is central to species interactions. In aquatic environments, most taxa use chemical cues to assess predation risk and other key ecological factors. A number of laboratory studies suggest that anthropogenic pollutants can disrupt chemoreception, even when at low, non-toxic concentrations, but there are few tests of whether real-world variation in...

Pollutants, brought into a swimming pool by bathers, will react with chlorine to form disinfection by-products (DBPs). Some of these DBPs are found to be respiratory and ocular irritant and might be associated with asthma, or might even be carcinogenic. As DBPs in swimming pools are formed from bather-shed-pollutants, a reduction of these pollutants will lead to a reduction of DBPs. Until now, ...