Jajarm Alumina Plant, the only Alumina powder producer in Iran, generates 500,000 tons of red mud annually. The commonest method for final disposal of red mud in Iran is Tailing dam which is neither cost-effective nor environmentally-friendly. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the possibility of red mud recovery to be used for stabilization of loose soils. Red mud samples have been collected from tailing dam of Jajarm Alumina Plant to be characterized, using X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF). The soil stabilizer has been made by mixing red mud, steel slag, sodium metasilicate, and sodium hydroxide. In order to study the effect of soil stabilizer, five soil samples have been prepared which contain clay, sand, and wind-blown sand ranging from zero to 4 millimeters. Findings show that adding soil stabilizer with red mud significantly enhances compressive strength of soil samples (4.2, 18.2, 5.4, 4, and 4.1 in S1 to S5 samples, respectively). Also the results demonstrate that the red mud, produced from Aluminum industry in Iran, might be successfully used to stabilize loose soils, thereby enhancing their compressive characteristics, reducing environmental issues associated with uncontrolled disposal of such wastes as well as promoting integrated solid waste management strategies.

This study presents the natural dye recovery from various biodegradable temple and household wastes. The raw material for colour extraction consisted residual flowers and garlands from various temples as well as onion and vegetables peels from vegetable markets, university hostels, and households, which were washed, dried, crushed, and sieved. The extracted natural colours were produced by means of ultra-sonication, and were dried in the spray drier, being characterized by FT-IR and UV-Vis Spectrophotometers. They were used to dye various fabrics such as cotton, silk, and wool, not to mention different mordents. It was found out that the remaining residue, left after dye extraction, was rich in nutrients, hence, it could be further used as the resource material, itself. As a result, we explored these residual wastes for vermicomposting and biochar production, which can be further employed as an organic fertilizer for agriculture. Overall, the present waste management approach will lead to a closed-loop environmental management through waste reduction and reutilization. It will also provide value-added materials for economic gains from waste. Thus, it can be promoted as a potential mechanism to maintain the environmental sustainability at wider scales.

Plastic usage increases year by year, and the growing trend is projected to continue. However as of 2017, only 9% of the 9 billion tons of plastic ever produced had been recycled leaving large amounts of plastics to contaminate the environment, resulting in important negative health and economic impacts. Curbing this trend is a major challenge that requires urgent and multifaceted action. Based on scientific and gray literature mainly published during the last 10 years, this review summarizes key solutions currently in use globally that have the potential to address at scale the plastic and microplastic contaminations from source to sea. They include technologies to control plastics in solid wastes (i.e. mechanical and chemical plastic recycling or incineration), in-stream (i.e. booms and clean-up boats, trash racks, and sea bins), and microplastics (i.e. stormwater, municipal wastewater and drinking water treatment), as well as general policy measures (i.e. measures to support the informal sector, bans, enforcement of levies, voluntary measures, extended producer responsibility, measures to enhance recycling and guidelines, standards and protocols to guide activities and interventions) to reduce use, reuse, and recycle plastics and microplastics in support of the technological options. The review discusses the effectiveness, capital expenditure, and operation and maintenance costs of the different technologies, the cost of implementation of policy measures, and the suitability of each solution under various conditions. This guidance is expected to help policymakers and practitioners address, in a sustainable and cost-efficient way, the plastic and microplastic management problem using technologies and policy instruments suitable in their local context.

International audience | Abstract Fifty million cubic meters of marine sediments are dredged each year in France in order to maintain harbor activities and sustain the economy of littoral territories. Because of anthropogenic activities in and around harbors, sediments can contain significant amounts of chemical and organic pollutants whose behavior during dredging must be addressed in order to avoid releasing risks for humans and the environment. French regulations come to govern the management of dredged sediments, considering them “safe” and possible to be dumped at sea or “contaminated” and needed to be treated on land as waste. In recent years, new constraints have been pushed toward the management of land. This management is, however, challenging as few channels are proposed to reuse marine sediments, and elimination appears to be economically and environmentally unsustainable. This study provides an overview of the technical and regulatory aspects related to dredged marine sediment management in France and aims to identify and discuss the limits of their valorization. Dredged sediments are mainly composed of particles with heterogeneous grain size, some being known for many applications such as building materials and growing media. However, several reasons have been put forward to explain why these particles are not reused when extracted from dredged sediments. Several technical, socio-economic, and regulatory obstacles explain the low demand for dredged sediments. This demand can be stimulated by government incentives and a good regulatory framework. National regulations could help streamline their reuse by removing their “waste” status and creating a regulated market for dredged sediment.

The progressive increase of marine macro-litter on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea is an urgent problem that needs accurate information and guidance to identify those areas most at risk of accumulation. In the absence of dedicated monitoring programs, an important source of opportunistic data is fishery-independent monitoring campaigns of demersal resources. These data have long been used but not yet extensively. In this paper, MEDiterranean International Trawl Survey (MEDITS) data was supplemented with 18 layers of information related to major environmental (e.g. depth, sea water and wind velocity, sea waves) and anthropogenic (e.g. river inputs, shipping lanes, urban areas and ports, fishing effort) forcings that influence seafloor macro-litter distribution. The Random Forest (RF), a machine learning approach, was applied to: i) model the distribution of several litter categories at a high spatial resolution (i.e. 1 km2); ii) identify major accumulation hot spots and their temporal trends. Results indicate that RF is a very effective approach to model the distribution of marine macro-litter and provides a consistent picture of the heterogeneous distribution of different macro-litter categories. The most critical situation in the study area was observed in the north-eastern part of the western basin. In addition, the combined analysis of weight and density data identified a tendency for lighter items to accumulate in areas (such as the northern part of the Tyrrhenian Sea) with more stagnant currents. This approach, based on georeferenced information widely available in public databases, seems a natural candidate to be applied in other basins as a support and complement tool to field monitoring activities and strategies for protection and remediation of the most impacted areas.

If municipal solid waste (MSW) is not properly managed, harmful environmental consequences are imminent. MSW materials are rarely wasted in many affluent countries, but rather are kept in the economic cycle through circular economy models. While in many developing countries, MSW materials are discarded with little to no effort of repairing or recycling. Moving to a circular economy will drastically reduce the amount of waste currently disposed of. This study examines how the Swakopmund Municipality in Namibia’s present municipal solid waste management techniques could be adjusted toward sustainability to reap environmental and socioeconomic benefits from the trash. Source reduction, separation at source, and recycling are some of the most effective strategies in the circular economy models that will help achieve the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Swakopmund Municipality should invest in infrastructure, techniques, and programs that are within the circular economy model as an emerging system for sustainability.

Modification of biochar by low-cost iron sources has gained increasing attention to improve pollutants removal performance and reduce production costs compared to conventional chemical modifications. While such iron sources generally have complex compositions, their effects on properties of the iron-biochar composite are not well investigated. This study produced an iron-biochar (RBC) composite from co-pyrolysis of incinerated sewage sludge ash (ISSA) and peanut shell, and examined the role of silica with widespread existence in ISSA and other low-cost iron sources on properties of the iron-biochar composite relevant to As(III)/As(V) removal. Silica was found to react with iron during the pyrolysis process at 850 °C and formed iron silicon at the expense of producing zero valent iron and Fe₃O₄ which resulted in a poorer removal efficacy for As(III) and As(V) compared to the iron-biochar (FBC) made from pure Fe₂O₃ and peanut shell. Moreover, a high leaching of reactive silica from RBC was observed which affected the formation of corrosion products of ZVI and competed with arsenic for active adsorption sites. Despite this, RBC still exhibited a maximum adsorption capacity of 17.44 and 57.56 mg/g towards As(III) and As(V) respectively at pH 3.0. Overall, this study provides an interesting insight into upcycling ISSA into useful media for sorptive removal of arsenic from aqueous solutions.

In recent years, pollution of antibiotics and heavy metal has often been reported in organic wastes. Saprophytic insects have been recorded as biological control agents in organic waste management. During organic waste conversion, the intestinal bacteria of the saprophytic insects play an important role in digestion, physiology, immunity and prevention of pathogen colonization. Black soldier fly (BSF) Hermetia illucens has been widely used as saprophytic insects and showed tolerance to sulfonamides (SAs) and cadmium (Cd). Diversity and changes in gut microbiota of black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) were evaluated through 16S rRNA high-throughput sequencing, and a decrease in diversity of gut microbiota along with an increase in SAs stress was recorded. Major members identified were Actinomycetaceae, Enterobacteriaceae, and Enterococcaceae. And fourteen multi-resistance Klebsiella pneumoniae strains were isolated. Two strains BSFL7-B-5 (from middle midgut of 7-day BSFL) and BSFL11-C-1 (from posterior midgut of 11-day BSFL) were found to be low-toxic and multi-resistance. The adsorption rate of SAs in 5 mg/kg solutions by these two strains reached 65.2% and 61.6%, respectively. Adsorption rate of Cd in 20 mg/L solutions was 77.2% for BSFL7-B-5. The strain BSFL11-C-1 showed higher than 70% adsorption rates of Cd in 20, 30 and 40 mg/L solutions. This study revealed that the presence of multi-resistance bacterial strains in the gut of BSFL helped the larvae against SAs or Cd stress. After determining how and where they are used, selected BSFL gut bacterial strains might be utilized in managing SAs or Cd contamination at suitable concentrations in the future.

Plastic pollution is emerging as a potential threat to the marine environment. In the current study, we selected seagrass meadows, known to efficiently trap organic and inorganic particles, to investigate the concentrations and dynamics of microplastics in their soil. We assessed microplastic contamination and accumulation in ²¹⁰Pb dated soil cores collected in Posidonia oceanica meadows at three locations along the Spanish Mediterranean coast, with two sites located in the Almería region (Agua Amarga and Roquetas) and one at Cabrera Island (Santa Maria). Almería is known for its intense agricultural industry with 30 000 ha of plastic-covered greenhouses, while the Cabrera Island is situated far from urban areas. Microplastics were extracted using enzymatic digestion and density separation. The particles were characterized by visual identification and with Fourier-transformed infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, and related to soil age-depth chronologies. Our findings showed that the microplastic contamination and accumulation was negligible until the mid-1970s, after which plastic particles increased dramatically, with the highest concentrations of microplastic particles (MPP) found in the recent (since 2012) surface soil of Agua Amarga (3819 MPP kg⁻¹), followed by the top-most layers of the soil of the meadows in Roquetas (2173 kg⁻¹) and Santa Maria (68–362 kg⁻¹). The highest accumulation rate was seen in the Roquetas site (8832 MPP m⁻² yr⁻¹). The increase in microplastics in the seagrass soil was associated to land-use change following the intensification of the agricultural industry in the area, with a clear relationship between the development of the greenhouse industry in Almería and the concentration of microplastics in the historical soil record. This study shows a direct linkage between intense anthropogenic activity, an extensive use of plastics and high plastic contamination in coastal marine ecosystems such as seagrass meadows. We highlight the need of proper waste management to protect the coastal environment from continuous pollution.