The emergence of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic highlighted the importance of disinfection processes in health safety. Textiles and footwear have been identified as vectors for spreading infections. Therefore, their disinfection can be crucial to controlling pathogens’ dissemination. The present work aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a commercial disinfectant aerosolized by an ultrasonic nebulizer closet as an effective method for disinfecting textiles and footwear. The disinfection was evaluated in three steps: suspension tests; nebulization in a 0.08 m3 closet; nebulization in the upscaled 0.58 m3 closet. The disinfection process of textiles and footwear was followed by the use of bacteriophages, bacterial spores, and bacterial cells. The disinfection in the 0.58 m3 closet was efficient for textiles (4 log reduction) when bacteriophage Lambda, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Bacillus subtilis were used. The footwear disinfection was achieved (4 log reduction) in the 0.08 m3 closet for Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus. Disinfection in an ultrasonic nebulization closet has advantages such as being quick, not wetting, being efficient on porous surfaces, and is performed at room temperature. Ultrasonic nebulization disinfection in a closet proves to be useful in clothing and footwear stores to prevent pathogen transmission by the items’ widespread handling.

Bioleaching is an actual economical alternative to treat residues, which allows, depending on the chosen strategy, two possible outcomes: (1) a leachate enriched with target metals, or (2) a residue enriched in target metals through the leaching of interfering components (IC). This work aimed to study the metals released by bioprocessing the Panasqueira mine tailings, as a strategy to increase critical metals' relative concentration in residues. Biostimulation of the local microbiota was compared to a bioaugmentation approach using the autochthonous Diaphorobacter polyhydroxybutyrativorans strain B2A2W2. Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) was selected to study the metals released in the leachate through multi-element external standards. A new data treatment method was developed to use a preliminary sweep of intensities to quantify the non-initial target metals concentration in the leachate, based on preliminary ICP-MS intensity measurements. The results demonstrated that biostimulation was an efficient bioleaching strategy for the IC silicon, aluminium, magnesium, selenium, manganese, zinc, iron, and copper, by decreasing concentration, resulting in a relative increase in the gallium and yttrium (10x) levels in the treated residue. The strategy followed to quantify a large number of elements with ICP-MS using a reduced number of data points for calibration proved valid and speeded up the analytical process.