When it comes to aerosol pollution, as the old real estate adage says, location is everything.

For many, the first thing that comes to mind when they think of oil spills is an image of great big oil sheens in the middle of the ocean, tarballs washing up on beaches, and photos of oiled wildlife on the internet.

Watermelon rind, usually discarded as waste, has been shown by researchers in Pakistan to be capable of cheaply and efficiently removing arsenic from groundwater.

Socio-economic position determines the environmental hazards—such as air pollution and noise—that pregnant women are exposed to in urban areas, although the nature of the association varies from city to city. This was the main conclusion of a new study conducted with the participation of the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by the ”la Caixa” Banking Foundation.

Plastic waste—particularly from smoking– still dominates litter collected from B.C. coastlines, a recent study from the University of British Columbia has found.

New NOAA-led research has found that the temperature of a wildfire is a better predictor of what’s in the smoke than the type of fuel being burned - a surprising result that will advance a wildfire smoke-modeling tool currently under development.

Groundwater contamination is increasingly recognized as a widespread environmental problem. The most important course of action often involves long-term monitoring. But what is the most cost-effective way to monitor when the contaminant plumes are large, complex, and long-term, or an unexpected event such as a storm could cause sudden changes in contaminant levels that may be missed by periodic sampling?

University of Toronto researchers say they have conducted the most comprehensive monitoring of airborne mercury ever in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), finding that although mercury concentrations continue to be low, emission levels officially reported to the government are often inaccurate.

As marine mammals evolved to make water their primary habitat, they lost the ability to make a protein that defends humans and other land-dwelling mammals from the neurotoxic effects of a popular man-made pesticide, according to new research from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

The implications of this discovery, announced today in Science, led researchers to call for monitoring our waterways to learn more about the impact of pesticides and agricultural run-off on marine mammals, such as dolphins, manatees, seals and whales. The research also may shed further light on the function of the gene encoding this protein in humans.

“We need to determine if marine mammals are, indeed, at an elevated risk of serious neurological damage from these pesticides because they biologically lack the ability to break them down, or if they’ve somehow adapted to avoid such damage in an as-yet undiscovered way,” said senior author Nathan L. Clark, Ph.D., associate professor in Pitt’s Department of Computational and Systems Biology, and the Pittsburgh Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine. “Either way, this is the kind of serendipitous finding that results from curiosity-driven scientific research. It is helping us to understand what our genes are doing and the impact the environment can have on them.”

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Image via R. Bonde, USGS

Several greenhouse gases are emitted as common plastics degrade in the environment, according to researchers from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST).

Mass production of plastics started nearly 70 years ago, and the production rate is expected to double over the next two decades. While serving many applications because of their durability, stability and low cost, plastics have a negative impact on the environment. Plastic is known to release a variety of chemicals during degradation, some of which negatively affect organisms and ecosystems.

The study, published in PLOS One, reports the unexpected discovery of the universal production of greenhouse gases methane and ethylene by the most common plastics when exposed to sunlight. The SOEST team tested polycarbonate, acrylic, polypropylene, polyethylene terephthalate, polystyrene, high-density polyethylene and low-density polyethylene (LDPE)—materials used to make food storage, textiles, construction materials and various plastic goods. Polyethylene, used in shopping bags, is the most produced and discarded synthetic polymer globally, and was found to be the most prolific emitter of both gases.

The team found that the emission rate of the gases from virgin pellets of LDPE increased during a 212-day experiment, and that LDPE debris found in the ocean also emitted greenhouse gases when exposed to sunlight. Once exposed to solar radiation, the emission of these gases continued in the dark.

Continue reading at University of Hawaii Manoa

Image via University of Hawaii Manoa