Remediation: A Novel Approach for Reducing Environmental Pollution

Hazardous contaminants persist more and more now, which negatively impacts the world in various ways. Nearly every second species on earth is experiencing the worst problem with their existence as a result of high environmental contamination. While more recent remediation methods have made improvements, conventional methods have not successfully removed dangerous substances from the environment. Hazardous contaminants elimination using the remediation technique (HCER) is a process that uses remineralization to eliminate hazardous contaminants from contaminated soils and groundwater. The process involves removing hazardous constituents from contaminated soil or groundwater through either mechanical or biological means; then replacing these constituents with beneficial elements to restore environmental quality. Remediation technologies are used for both on-site and off-site applications, including landfills, industrial sites, municipal solid waste landfills, construction sites (e.g., roads), mine tailing piles and other areas where contamination exists due to anthropogenic activities such as mining operations, oil spills and landfill leachate seepage. The present study aims to examine and analyze the literature in the area of remediation strategies used to get rid of toxins, mainly from soil and water

Removal of Microplastic Pollution through Waste Water Treatment: A Review

The presence of plastic materials in a water stream is a serious environmental concern because of their poor degradability characteristics. The enormous rise in the production of plastics causes a significant amount of plastic waste on the land to enter water bodies. If the particle size is small at the micro level (less than 5 mm in diameter), it has significant potential for blocking the fine pores of filtration and membrane systems. Their encroachment also poses a threat to human health in the food chain. Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) play an important role in removing a significant amount of microplastics; otherwise, they end up in the process of bioaccumulation. This study provides an idea about the characteristics of microplastics, removal efficiency, and the correlation between wastewater quality and microplastic concentrations from three different WWTPs that differ in the biological and advanced wastewater treatment techniques, which are believed to play an important role in microplastic removal. It also focuses on how waste treatment facilities affect the retention of microplastics and discusses issues with using sewage sludge laden with microplastic

Alcohol use and burden for 195 countries and territories, 1990-2016 : a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

Background Alcohol use is a leading risk factor for death and disability, but its overall association with health remains complex given the possible protective effects of moderate alcohol consumption on some conditions. With our comprehensive approach to health accounting within the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016, we generated improved estimates of alcohol use and alcohol-attributable deaths and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) for 195 locations from 1990 to 2016, for both sexes and for 5-year age groups between the ages of 15 years and 95 years and older. Methods Using 694 data sources of individual and population-level alcohol consumption, along with 592 prospective and retrospective studies on the risk of alcohol use, we produced estimates of the prevalence of current drinking, abstention, the distribution of alcohol consumption among current drinkers in standard drinks daily (defined as 10 g of pure ethyl alcohol), and alcohol-attributable deaths and DALYs. We made several methodological improvements compared with previous estimates: first, we adjusted alcohol sales estimates to take into account tourist and unrecorded consumption; second, we did a new meta-analysis of relative risks for 23 health outcomes associated with alcohol use; and third, we developed a new method to quantify the level of alcohol consumption that minimises the overall risk to individual health. Findings Globally, alcohol use was the seventh leading risk factor for both deaths and DALYs in 2016, accounting for 2.2% (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 1.5-3.0) of age-standardised female deaths and 6.8% (5.8-8.0) of age-standardised male deaths. Among the population aged 15-49 years, alcohol use was the leading risk factor globally in 2016, with 3.8% (95% UI 3.2-4-3) of female deaths and 12.2% (10.8-13-6) of male deaths attributable to alcohol use. For the population aged 15-49 years, female attributable DALYs were 2.3% (95% UI 2.0-2.6) and male attributable DALYs were 8.9% (7.8-9.9). The three leading causes of attributable deaths in this age group were tuberculosis (1.4% [95% UI 1. 0-1. 7] of total deaths), road injuries (1.2% [0.7-1.9]), and self-harm (1.1% [0.6-1.5]). For populations aged 50 years and older, cancers accounted for a large proportion of total alcohol-attributable deaths in 2016, constituting 27.1% (95% UI 21.2-33.3) of total alcohol-attributable female deaths and 18.9% (15.3-22.6) of male deaths. The level of alcohol consumption that minimised harm across health outcomes was zero (95% UI 0.0-0.8) standard drinks per week. Interpretation Alcohol use is a leading risk factor for global disease burden and causes substantial health loss. We found that the risk of all-cause mortality, and of cancers specifically, rises with increasing levels of consumption, and the level of consumption that minimises health loss is zero. These results suggest that alcohol control policies might need to be revised worldwide, refocusing on efforts to lower overall population-level consumption.Peer reviewe