ABSTRACT
Attention to urban agriculture (UA) has recently grown among practitioners, scientists, and the public, resulting in several initiatives worldwide. Despite the positive perception of modern UA and locally grown, fresh produce, the potential food safety risks connected to these practices may be underestimated, leading to regulatory gaps. Thus, there is a need for assessment tools to evaluate the food safety risks connected to specific UA initiatives, to assist practitioners in self-evaluation and control, and to provide policy makers and scholars a means to pursue and assess food safety in city regions, avoiding either a lack or an excess of regulation that could ultimately hinder the sector. To address this aim, this paper reviews the most recent and relevant literature on UA food safety assessments. Food safety indicators were identified first. Then, a food safety assessment framework for UA initiatives was developed. The framework uses business surveys and food analyses (if available) as a data source for calculating a food safety index for single UA businesses and the whole UA landscape of a given city region. The proposed framework was designed to allow its integration into the CRFS (City Region Food System) toolkit developed by FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), RUAF foundation (Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security) and Wilfrid Laurier University.
ABSTRACT
High silica zeolite Y has been positively evaluated to clean-up water polluted with sulfonamides, an antibiotic family which is known to be involved in the antibiotic resistance evolution. To define possible strategies for the exhausted zeolite regeneration, the efficacy of some chemico-physical treatments on the zeolite loaded with four different sulfonamides was evaluated. The evolution of photolysis, Fenton-like reaction, thermal treatments, and solvent extractions and the occurrence in the zeolite pores of organic residues eventually entrapped was elucidated by a combined thermogravimetric (TGA-DTA), diffractometric (XRPD), and spectroscopic (FT-IR) approach. The chemical processes were not able to remove the organic guest from zeolite pores and a limited transformation on embedded molecules was observed. On the contrary, both thermal treatment and solvent extraction succeeded in the regeneration of the zeolite loaded from deionized and natural fresh water. The recyclability of regenerated zeolite was evaluated over several adsorption/regeneration cycles, due to the treatment efficacy and its stability as well as the ability to regain the structural features of the unloaded material.
