Urine diversion shows multiple environmental benefits when used at city scale phys.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from phys.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
It could be a crucial step toward an informed public health response to diseases like COVID-19.
Testing wastewater a robust source of COVID-19 as those infected shed the virus in their stool could be used for more responsive tracking and supplementing information public health officials rely on when evaluating efforts to contain the virus, such as enhanced public health measures and even vaccines when they become available.
The test identifies and measures genetic material in the form of RNA from SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
“This work confirms that trends in concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater tracks with trends of new COVID-19 infections in the community. Wastewater data complements the data from clinical testing and may provide additional insight into COVID-19 infections within communities,” says Alexandria Boehm, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University and co-senior author of the research in
E-Mail
Many people think of composting organic matter as a way of keeping solid waste out of landfills, but a new study from North Carolina State University finds there can be significant environmental benefits associated with using compost at landfills. There are an increasing number of composting programs out there, and many of them are required to use the resulting compost beneficially, says James Levis, corresponding author of the study and a research assistant professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering at NC State. A lot of state and local regulations don t recognize alternative daily cover as a beneficial use. But our work shows that using compost as alternative daily cover at landfills is competitive, and often superior, to the use of compost as a soil amendment in terms of its environmental benefits.
Discarded masks infecting oceans as side effect of Covid pandemic independent.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from independent.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
University of California, Riverside have found that pipe alloy can react with residual water disinfectants to produce cancer-causing chromium that gets mixed in drinking water. In a study published in the journal
Pipe alloy plus disinfectants a cancerous combination
Chromium is a naturally occurring metal in the soil and groundwater. It is often added to iron to produce a corrosion-resistant metal alloy. Trace amounts of trivalent chromium (chromium-3) appear in drinking water, but this form of chromium is thought to have neutral effects on health.
However, co-author Haizhou Liu of UC Riverside’s
Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering suspected that the chromium found in drinking water might have come from chemical reactions with water disinfectants.