Assessment of the state of food waste treatment in the United States and Canada.

Currently in the US, over 97% of food waste is estimated to be buried in landfills. There is nonetheless interest in strategies to divert this waste from landfills as evidenced by a number of programs and policies at the local and state levels, including collection programs for source separated organic wastes (SSO). The objective of this study was to characterize the state-of-the-practice of food waste treatment alternatives in the US and Canada. Site visits were conducted to aerobic composting and two anaerobic digestion facilities, in addition to meetings with officials that are responsible for program implementation and financing. The technology to produce useful products from either aerobic or anaerobic treatment of SSO is in place. However, there are a number of implementation issues that must be addressed, principally project economics and feedstock purity. Project economics varied by region based on landfill disposal fees. Feedstock purity can be obtained by enforcement of contaminant standards and/or manual or mechanical sorting of the feedstock prior to and after treatment. Future SSO diversion will be governed by economics and policy incentives, including landfill organics bans and climate change mitigation policies.

Waste-to-energy: A review of the status and benefits in USA.

The USA has significant experience in the field of municipal solid waste management. The hierarchy of methodologies for dealing with municipal solid wastes consists of recycling and composting, combustion with energy recovery (commonly called waste-to-energy) and landfilling. This paper focuses on waste-to-energy and especially its current status and benefits, with regard to GHG, dioxin and mercury emissions, energy production and land saving, on the basis of experience of operating facilities in USA.

A basin-wide approach to dredged material management in New York/New Jersey Harbor.

In the last decade, an area of increasing estuarine research in the New York/New Jersey Harbor has been the identification of toxic contaminant sources, mapping of contaminant levels in water and sediments, and assessment of contaminant accumulation in biota. The accumulation of anthropogenic contamination in the harbor's sediments has occurred for centuries, primarily from land-based municipal and industrial sources. Contaminants from land-based sources introduced into surface waters rapidly become scavenged by suspended particles that then tend to settle to the bottom, primarily in deep areas, such as berths and navigation channels. Several million cubic meters of sediments must be dredged annually to clear navigation channels. In the past, the dredged material was disposed in a designated ocean site. However, in1992, new testing procedures were implemented, and much of the harbor's dredged material was determined to be unsuitable for ocean placement. It is ironic that these restrictions came at a time when the quality of harbor sediments is improving, largely because of pollution controls implemented as a result of the Clean Water Act and other environmental measures put in place by government and industry. For example, the harbor-wide concentration of mercury has decreased to 0.7-0.8ppm, a level that is approaching the pre-industrial background level. Nevertheless, in certain areas of the harbor, there remain sufficiently high concentrations of contaminants to merit concern and to create serious problems for sponsors of dredging projects. Development of a basin-wide sediment management strategy is necessary to guide port decision-makers in their efforts to clean-up contaminant sources, to dredge regional waterways, and to ameliorate the contaminated sediment disposal problem. The backbone of this strategy is the integration of the data from an ongoing field monitoring and modeling program with a parallel investigation of watershed and airshed sources and sinks using industrial ecology methodology.

Optimal dosing interval for penicillin treatment of streptococcal pharyngitis.

One-hundred-forty-two children with symptomatic pharyngitis had throat cultures positive for group A beta-hemolytic streptococci (GABHA). All were treated orally with penicillin V for ten days. Patients were randomly assigned to receive daily doses of 250 mg four times daily, 500 mg twice daily, or 1000 mg once daily. They were followed four weeks for either recurrent symptomatic pharyngitis or asymptomatic repeat positive throat culture. Patients treated two or four times daily had comparable outcomes. Children given penicillin once daily were more likely to have persistent positive culture after 48 hours treatment (5 of 48 or 10.4% vs. none of 94, p = .004) and more likely to have recurrent positive cultures after end of treatment (10 of 43 or 23% vs. 8 of 94 or 8%, p = .04). The treatment regime of penicillin V 500 mg twice daily is recommended for treatment of pharyngitis due to GABHS.