Ensuring poor people’s access to safe drinking-water and adequate sanitation and encouraging personal, domestic and community hygiene will improve the quality of life of millions of individuals. Better managing water resources to reduce the transmission of vector-borne diseases (such as viral diseases carried by mosquitoes) and to make water bodies safe for recreational and other users can save many lives and has ...

With expanded and tougher criteria on toxic chemicals, electronic waste and new criteria on climate change only Sony and Sony Ericsson score more than 5/10 in our latest Guide to Greener Electronics. Nintendo and Microsoft remain rooted to the bottom of the Guide. Ranking criteria explained: As of the 8th edition of the Guide to Greener Electronics, Greenpeace scores electronics brands on a tightened set of ...

Geostatistics, which can be defined as the tools for studying and predicting the spatial structure of georeferenced variables, have been mainly used in soil science during the past two decades. Since now, hundreds of geostatistical papers have been published on soil science issues. The use of geostatistical tools in soil science is diverse and extensive. It can be for studying and predicting soil contamination in ...

Trash is a pervasive but unnoticed part of our lives. The great irony of waste management is that even the most efficient and well-run waste collection programs remain out of sight, ignored by the public that they serve. Only with failure does the omnipresence of trash really come to light. Today, many nations face a looming waste management crisis, as their landfills reach capacity and continue to degrade the ...

The Second International Workshop on Remote Sensing of Emissions: New Technologies and Recent Work was held April 1-3, 2008. The workshop was sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency`s (EPA) Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards at Research Triangle Park (RTP), Office of Research and Development (RTP), and Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response (HQ). At the workshop, studies involving the ...

The increase in national recycling rates achieved by local authorities since the publication of Waste Strategy 2000 has been impressive. The growth from 7% to 31% in 2006/07 has been achieved through a mixture of investment and ingenuity, but it has resulted in the creation of a number of different collection systems with many local variations. Although opinions about the merits of the different systems are often ...

Climate change is no longer simply an environmental issue. It is rapidly becoming one of the defining forces of economic development in the 21st century. It will shape investment, technology deployment, and human development around the world, and no sector will be more profoundly affected than energy. Given the constraints that climate impacts bring, thriving in the evolving global energy market will mean ...

This autumn the European Parliament and Council of Ministers are expected to cast their final votes on fuel efficiency standards for cars. The EU positions itself as a world leader on climate change, yet it has steadfastly failed to stand up to he car lobby. If the EU does not effectively legislate for greater fuel efficiency, it is in danger of failing to meet its own 2020 greenhouse gas emission reduction ...

Natural arsenic pollution of drinking water has been reported from over 70 countries world-wide, affecting an estimated 150 million people (Ravenscroft et. al., 2008). About 50 million of these people live in Bangladesh, 30 million in India and 33 million in six other countries of south and south-east Asia. It has recently been recognised that arsenic-contaminated groundwater used for irrigation in these countries ...

Public financing is often essential for encouraging the assessment and cleanup of brownfields. Without public financing or government-backed financial incentives, many brownfields would remain idle and potentially contaminated. The costs associated with the redevelopment of brownfields include costs associated with demolition, site preparation, and construction. In addition to these costs, capital is required for ...