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Wastewater Remediation and Biomass Production: A Hybrid Technology to Remove Pollutants
Published in Jos T. Puthur, Om Parkash Dhankher, Bioenergy Crops, 2022
Palliyath Sruthi, A.K. Sinisha, K.V. Ajayan
Clean and fresh water is the unavoidable requirement of life equal to food and shelter, by surface and ground water sources. Due to increasing urbanization and industrialization, water sources are becoming polluted and getting destroyed. The natural water bodies get destroyed by the discharge of organic and inorganic waste, causing detrimental impacts on aquatic ecosystems (Gandhi et al. 2013, Safauldeen et al. 2019). Among the conventional methods, the bioremediation technique is an efficient and low cost method (phytoremediation and phycoremediation techniques) being used to cleanup the deadly polluted environment. Phytoremediation and phycoremediation are the branches of bioremediation that employ the application of plants and algae, respectively, for the remediation of wastewater. Aquatic plants have the capacity to absorb contaminants such as organic and inorganic substances, heavy metals, and pharmaceutical pollutants present in agricultural, domestic and industrial wastewater (Mustafa and Hayder 2021).
Waste and Pollution
Published in John C. Ayers, Sustainability, 2017
The least effective waste reduction strategy is energy recovery, which for solid waste is called waste incineration. This approach takes waste that cannot be reused or recycled and burns it to reduce volume and recover energy as heat. First, noncombustible (inorganic) waste components are removed and landfilled. The remaining organic materials are biofuels, which have much lower carbon footprints than fossil fuels (Section 10.3). Arguments against waste incineration include that it releases small amounts of heavy metals to the atmosphere, that older incinerators can release trace amounts of dioxin, and that toxic wastes can be concentrated in the residue, which must be landfilled. Insufficient research has been done on these potential health risks. However, the overall risks to the environment and human health from these emissions seem likely to be lower than for coal, with the added benefit of reducing pollution from solid waste, which is a pollutant even if it is in a landfill because it is a resource out of place. All materials, even waste materials, should be viewed as potential resources from which we can derive benefits, but we obtain no benefits from landfilling solid waste. The EU has less available land to use for landfills than the United States due to its higher population density, so it incinerates a large portion of its waste to produce energy, with Denmark leading the way at 1.1 kg/d/p compared with < 0.3 kg/d/p in the United States (MacKay 2009).
Environmental hydraulics
Published in Amithirigala Widhanelage Jayawardena, Fluid Mechanics, Hydraulics, Hydrology and Water Resources for Civil Engineers, 2021
Amithirigala Widhanelage Jayawardena
Types of wastes include organic waste, inorganic waste, sediments, thermal, pathogenic bacteria, heavy metals (include lead, mercury, cadmium), trace metals (include iron, magnesium, lithium, zinc, copper, chromium, nickel, cobalt, vanadium, arsenic, molybdenum, manganese, selenium), synthetic organic chemicals and radioactive waste.
Compressive strength and microstructure evolution of low calcium brown coal fly ash-based geopolymer
Published in Journal of Sustainable Cement-Based Materials, 2020
Muhamed Khodr, David W. Law, Chamila Gunasekara, Sujeeva Setunge, Robert Brkljaca
Fly ash can be principally divided into two categories: low calcium class F fly ash, which is produced from burning anthracite and bituminous coals and high calcium class C fly ash which comes from the burning of lignite and sub-bituminous coals [5,9]. Lignite and sub-bituminous coals are also referred to as brown coal [10]. Australia's economically recoverable brown coal resources are 37 billion tonnes, corresponding to 25% of the worldwide resouces, with Russia, Germany, and the US also having significant reserves [11]. The production of brown coal fly ash in Australia, as a by-product from coal burning in power generation, was 25 million tonnes in 2013, with a forecast suggesting this will double by 2050. Due to the chemical composition, most notably high sulphur content, almost all the ash collected is directly disposed into ponds [12]. This inorganic waste has the added potential to leach out heavy metal to local aquifers and surface water, which incurs considerable cost to mitigate the potential risk.