The planning of cities must insure a balance between human consumption and natural resources that should be preserved and if needed should be used minimally and efficiently following plans of sustainability. The current study investigated the possibility of recycling natural waste product "plants leaves" that usually fall off, are collected, dumped and burnt. In counties like Kuwait where crude oil constitutes a major pollutant and the environment is hostile for microbial activity rendering bioremediation to be a trivial option. Thus, in the present study, the leaves of Conocarpus and Tamarix were used to enrich the low organic content soils that showed the potential of soil supplementation with organic matter to enhance the growth and activity of soil indigenous microbiota. The amendments of soils with 20 mg g -1 soil significantly increased the counts of crude oil-degrading bacteria in crude oil-contaminated and uncontaminated soils to 999.4 x 10 -3 CFU g -1 and 358.8 x 10 -3 CFU g -1 soil, respectively. The identification of isolated bacteria revealed the dominance of the genus Microbacterium (39.6%), Sphingopyxis soli (19.3%), and Bordetella petrii (19.6%) in unamended, Conocarpus-amended and Tamarix-amended contaminated soils, respectively. The 16S rRNA analyses showed the high diversity of isolated bacteria. Also, the diversity of the majority of isolated bacteria decreased after soil amendments with plant-derived material. Therefore, the recycling of plant-derived materials could be an excellent option under conditions tested and confirm the commandments of sustainable planning.

Drinking water regulations focus on the absence of indicator microorganisms in drinking water supplied to the end consumers to avoid the spread of potential diseases to members of the community. However, low counts of total heterotrophic bacteria are permissible. In general, total heterotrophic plate counts (HPC) may be used to represent the general hygiene of water where high HPC could indicate the presence of pathogenic bacteria, e.g. coliforms. Almost all of the standard methods for testing drinking water samples are culture-dependent methods that only detect microorganisms capable of utilizing standard microbiological culture media. However, the presence of viable but not culturable (unculturable) microorganisms (VBNC) makes it extremely important to employ techniques capable of detecting this fraction of water-borne microorganisms. Thus, the aim of the current study was to compare the outcome of applying traditional and molecular techniques for drinking water analysis. Results demonstrated the presence of VBNC bacteria such as Salmonella enterica, Corynebacterium glutamicum, Brachybacterium faecium, Clostridium phytofermentans, Enterobacter sp., Beutenbergia cavernae, Saccharomonospora viridis, Bacillus subtilis, Fervidobacterium nodosum in some water samples, which were not detected by traditional techniques. This suggested that, molecular techniques are inevitable and more reliable than traditional methods.