Water Quality and the Impact on Human Health and the Environment: The Current International and EU Regulatory Framework
Stefania Negri in Environmental Health in International and EU Law, 2019
The purpose of this Directive is to establish an agenda for the protection of inland surface waters, transitional waters, coastal waters, and groundwater that: ‘(a) prevents further deterioration and protects and enhances the status of aquatic ecosystems and, with regard to their water needs, terrestrial ecosystems and wetlands directly depending on the aquatic ecosystems; (b) promotes sustainable water use based on a long-term protection of available water resources; (c) aims at enhanced protection and improvement of the aquatic environment, inter alia, through specific measures for the progressive reduction of discharges, emissions, and losses of priority substances and the cessation or phasing-out of discharges, emissions and losses of the priority hazardous substances; (d) ensures the progressive reduction of pollution of groundwater and prevents its further pollution; and (e) contributes to mitigating the effects of floods and droughts’.28
The environment: our ultimate arbitrator
Théodore H MacDonald in Health, Trade and Human Rights, 2018
Before the European industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people all over the world had a somewhat similar association with water. They relied almost exclusively on water available at, or near, the surface of the earth. Rivers, lakes and springs constituted the most commonly used sources. Indeed, it was widely assumed that these sources were inexhaustible, due to the evaporation-rain cycle. However, in Europe and North America, rapid industrialisation quickly changed all that. Large quantities of the easily accessible water were needed to run generators and other machinery. River sources – and, more recently, ocean coastlines – became polluted and unfit for use. Sewerage systems became necessary as larger concentrations of people grew up around ports and factories. In the first world, we began our long-term exploitation of underground water resources (aquifers*) and even the elaboration of huge desalination enterprises.
Worsening global equity of access to safe water
Théodore H MacDonald, Noël A Kinsella, John A Gibson in The Global Human Right to Health, 2018
Before the European ‘Industrial Revolution’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people everywhere had a somewhat similar association with water. They relied almost exclusively on water available at, or near, the surface of the earth. Rivers, lakes and springs constituted the most commonly used sources. Indeed, it was widely assumed that these sources were inexhaustible, due to the evaporation–rain cycle. However, in Europe and North America, rapid industrialisation quickly changed all that. Large quantities of the easily accessible water were needed to run generators and other machinery. River sources – and more recently ocean coastlines – became polluted and unfit for use. Sewerage systems became necessary as larger concentrations of people grew up around ports and factories. In the developed world, we began our long-term exploitation of underground water resources (aquifers, which are water-bearing rocks, or rock complexes, underground) and even the elaboration of huge desalination enterprises.
Multi-parametric groundwater quality and human health risk assessment vis-à-vis hydrogeochemical process in an Agri-intensive region of Indus basin, Punjab, India
Published in Toxin Reviews, 2022
Vijay Jaswal, Ravishankar Kumar, Prafulla Kumar Sahoo, Sunil Mittal, Ajay Kumar, Sunil Kumar Sahoo, Yogalakshmi Kadapakkam Nandabalan
According to the United Nations Sustainable Development report (UNSD 2017), approximately 2.2 billion people worldwide are deprived of safe drinking water. The 2030 agenda for sustainable development has adopted clean water and sanitation as one of the sustainable development goals and propounded that water scarcity would displace around 700 billion people worldwide by 2030. Water scarcity and deteriorating water quality have loomed into a massive threat to people around the world. Around half of the world's total population depends on groundwater as a drinking resource (Shukla and Saxena, 2020a, 2020b). The United Nations (UN) report (2015) states that the groundwater that accounts for 0.61% of total water resource serves 43% of global irrigation in addition to serving the drinking needs. Increasing demand of water for drinking, irrigation, domestic and industrial purposes has deteriorated the groundwater levels to become a major concern in 21st century (Oki and Akana 2016, Kawo and Karuppannan 2018).
Application of HMTL and novel IWQI models in rural groundwater quality assessment: a case study in Nigeria
Published in Toxin Reviews, 2022
Daniel A. Ayejoto, Johnbosco C. Egbueri, Monday T. Enyigwe, Osita I. Chiaghanam, Peter D. Ameh
Groundwater is one of the most important natural resources, as it is essential for human health, socioeconomic growth, and ecosystem functioning. It is also commonly used for a variety of residential, agricultural, and mining purposes (Bhat et al.2012, Gleeson et al.2016, Khan et al.2017, Ruiz et al.2019, Grönwall and Danert 2020). However, in recent years, groundwater contamination has emerged as one of the world’s most serious issues, as water resources are being contaminated by natural sources and a variety of human activities. Contamination of water sources by potentially toxic elements (PTEs) released from industrial and mining discharges remains one of the seemingly unending environmental problems faced by developing countries (Busico et al.2018, Egbueri and Enyigwe 2020, Obasi and Akudinobi 2020). As a result, a better understanding of groundwater quality and its evolution drivers is needed for long-term groundwater sustainability.
Hybrid powdered activated carbon-activated sludge biofilm formation to mitigate biofouling in dynamic membrane bioreactor for wastewater treatment
Published in Biofouling, 2022
Mohammad Reza Mehrnia, Fatemeh Nasiri, Fatemeh Pourasgharian Roudsari, Fatemeh Bahrami
Global insufficiency of water resources besides the widespread pollution of existing water bodies has put the process of wastewater treatment and reuse among the most substantial issues in the environmental engineering area. As a modern paradigm shift, wastewater is now considered a renewable resource which is capable of producing clean water, useful nutrients and renewable energy (Aslam et al. 2022). Different wastewater treatment approaches have been proposed, including physical (Prathapar et al. 2006) and chemical (Pidou et al. 2008) techniques, advanced oxidation process (AOP) (Liu et al. 2021) and biological methods (Holloway et al. 2021). Among them, biological methods, independently or in combination with other techniques (Xiang et al. 2021), stand out because of being cost efficient and lack production of more dangerous intermediates (Ayed et al. 2017). Moreover, the hybrid techniques can overcome the drawback of independent biological treatment, which is the removal of specific toxic compounds.
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