Development of a Multifaceted Perspective for Systematic Analysis, Assessment, and Performance for Environmental Standards of Contaminated Sites.

Contaminated soil and groundwater can pose significant risks to human health and ecological environments, making the remediation of contaminated sites a pressing and sustained challenge. It is significant to identify key performance indicators and advance environmental management standards of contaminated sites. The traditional study currently focuses on the inflexible collection of related files and displays configurable limitations regarding integrated assessment and in-depth analysis of published standards. In addition, there is a relative lack of research focusing on the analysis of different types of standard documents. Herein, we introduce a cross-systematic retrospective and review for the development of standards of the contaminated sites, including the comprehensive framework, multifaceted analysis, and improved suggestion of soil and groundwater standards related to the environment. The classification and structural characteristics of different types of files are systematically analyzed of over 300 national, trade, local, and group standards for the contaminated sites. It exhibits that trade standards are the main types and testing methods are the important format within numerical considerations of soil standards. The guide standard serves as a crucial component in environmental management for investigating, assessing, and remediating of contaminated sites. Future improvement plans and development directions are proposed for advancing robust technical support for effective soil contamination prevention and control. This multidimensional analysis and the accompanying suggestions can provide improved guidance for Chinese environmental management of contaminated sites and sparkle the application of standards in a wide range of countries.

A critical application of different methods for the vulnerability assessment of shallow aquifers in Zhengzhou City.

Groundwater vulnerability can partially reflect the possibility of groundwater contamination, which is crucial for ensuring human health and a good ecological environment. The current study seeks to assess the groundwater vulnerability of Zhengzhou City by adopting an amended version of the traditional DRASTIC model, i.e., the DRASTICL model, which incorporates land use type indicators. More specifically, the AHP-DRASTICL, entropy-DRASTICL, and AE-DRASTICL models were established by optimizing weights using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and entropy weight method. The evaluation results for these five models were divided into five levels: very low, low, medium, high, and very high. Using Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, the nitrate concentration was used to verify the groundwater vulnerability assessment results. The AE-DRASTICL model was found to perform the best, with a Spearman correlation coefficient of 0.78. However, the AHP and entropy weight method effectively improved the accuracy of vulnerability assessment results, making it more suitable for the study area. This study provides important insights to inform the design of strategies to protect groundwater in Zhengzhou.

A sustainability assessment-based methodology for the prioritization of contaminated site risk management options.

Contaminated site management is a multiple objective decision-making that generally involves different factors, such as performance of technology, environmental effects, cost, and social influence. In this study, we developed a sustainability assessment-based methodology for the prioritization of contaminated site risk management options. We integrate remediation sustainable assessment and redevelopment sustainable assessment in one framework and allow the optimization of indicators. The framework started with the definition of site management type, then investigating site characterization, screening indicators, quantifying of indicator, selecting assessment model, selecting primary options, assessment with uncertainty analysis, and determining of preferred options. To demonstrate the utility of the framework, results are presented in a contaminate site in southwest China for two risk management decisions, site remediation and site redevelopment. We used different approaches to evaluate the stability and robustness of assessment results, including Monte Carlo simulation, scenario analysis, and sensitivity analysis. The demonstration showed that attention has to be paid to the proper description of the site, the principles of the procedure, and the decision criteria.

Enhanced activation of peroxydisulfate by strontium modified BiFeO3perovskite for ciprofloxacin degradation.

A series of Sr-doped BiFeO3 perovskites (Bi1-xSrxFeO3, BSFO) fabricated via sol-gel method was applied as peroxydisulfate (PDS) activator for ciprofloxacin (CIP) degradation. Various technologies were used to characterize the morphology and physicochemical features of prepared BSFO samples and the results indicated that Sr was successfully inserted into the perovskites lattice. The catalytic performance of BiFeO3 was significantly boosted by strontium doping. Specifically, Bi0.9Sr0.1FeO3 (0.1BSFO) exhibited the highest catalytic performance for PDS activation to remove CIP, where 95% of CIP (10 mg/L) could be degraded with the addition of 1 g/L 0.1BSFO and 1 mmol/L PDS within 60 min. Moreover, 0.1BSFO displayed high reusability and stability with lower metal leaching. Weak acidic condition was preferred to neutral and alkaline conditions in 0.1BSFO/PDS system. The boosted catalytic performance can be interpreted as the lower oxidation state of Fe and the existence of affluent oxygen vacancies generated by Sr doping, that induced the formation of singlet oxygen (1O2) which was confirmed as the dominant reactive species by radical scavenging studies and electron spin resonance (ESR) tests. The catalytic oxidation mechanism related to major 1O2 and minor free radicals was proposed. Current study opens a new avenue to develop effective A-site modified perovskite and expands their application for PDS activation in wastewater remediation.

Comparison of multi-criteria analysis methodologies for the prioritization of arsenic-contaminated sites in the southwest of China.

The issue of contaminated sites has been highlighted as an immediate priority in the 13th Five-Year Plan of China. Identification and prioritization of contaminated sites are of key importance for proposing effective strategies for the regional management of contaminated sites. In this study, three advanced multi-attribute methodologies, the risk-based priority methodology, the regional risk assessment methodology, and the dominance-based rough set approach (DRSA), were comparatively employed to screen contaminated sites in, Guangxi, Southwest of China. The results of the three prioritizations show that the highest ranking site identified by the three methods had great agreement. In regard to the screening attributers, while the risk-based prioritization methodology and regional risk assessment methodology allowed a high discrimination in the screening of contaminated sites associated with different attributes, such as farmland, residential areas, contaminant level, number of people, area, storage quality, site service life, and surrounding communities, the DRSA allowed the identification of contamination strength (CS) and contamination potential (CP).

Risk assessment framework for nitrate contamination in groundwater for regional management.

Nitrate pollution in groundwater is now one of the most important environmental problems all over the world. For this purpose, a new framework for risk screening and assessment of groundwater nitrate was proposed according to source-pathway-receptor-response model to provide basic for defining environmental management strategies. The framework is composed of groundwater relative risk model (RRM), groundwater contamination risk assessment (CRA), and human health risk assessment (HHRA). The framework is applied in the lower Liaohe river basin plain, northeast of China. The results showed that the priority area with high groundwater relative risk in study area was successfully screened by RRM. Furthermore, the sites with high human health risk for public by groundwater nitrate were selected as hazardous areas. This framework promotes systematic integration of risk assessment of groundwater nitrate and expands traditional research on groundwater management from a scale-based approach to crucial insights into pollution.

A QSAR-based mechanistic study on the combined toxicity of antibiotics and quorum sensing inhibitors against Escherichia coli.

Quorum sensing inhibitors (QSIs) have attracted increasing attention due to their potential roles as the antibiotic alternatives. The combination of QSIs and antibiotics in clinical use and their subsequent release into the environment may result in joint effects on the ecology and environment, which has not received enough concerns yet. In this study, eight potential QSIs and three types of commonly used antibiotics, i.e., sulfonamides (SAs), ß-lactams and tetracyclines (TCs), were investigated for their combined toxicity on Escherichia coli (E. coli). The QSAR models for the combined toxicity were constructed using the interaction energies between the chemicals and their target proteins as calculated by molecular docking. It was revealed that the SAs and QSIs presented either additive or antagonistic joint effects in the mixture toxicity test, while ß-lactams and TCs showed only antagonistic effects with the QSIs. The analysis on the coefficients in the QSAR models suggested that the QSIs in the mixtures were more involved in the interaction with the proteins than the antibiotics. This study will help better understand the risks of joint exposure to the antibiotics and QSIs, and provide a new perspective for the study of the combined toxicity mechanism.