Advances in Environmental Engineering

Abstract

Environmental quality is crucial to our health, our economy, and our lives. However, it faces several serious challenges, not least those of climate change, unsustainable consumption, and production, as well as various forms of pollution. This Special Issue collects research papers aimed at a wide range of environmental topics: water and wastewater treatment and management, soil degradation and conservation, sediment pollution control, the environmental impact of technologies, life cycle analysis (LCA), air quality and indoor environment, and advanced environmental materials. Contributions describe novel and significant knowledge, scientific results, and advanced applications in the field of environmental engineering. This Special Issue provides an integrated view of the trends in solving the problems associated with the achievement of sustainability in environmental engineering. This issue contains twelve papers that have been selected as emerging studies dealing with the above-mentioned topics. The contributions, aimed at wastewater treatment, present a wide range of methods applied to various pollution removal methods. Investigating contaminants of emerging concern such as pharmaceuticals and personal care products reveals that the fate of these compounds in the aquatic environment has been a topic of wide interest and active research. Lecours et al. [1] applied different electrochemical approaches to the study of the oxidation products of the anti-infective trimethoprim, a contaminant of emerging concern frequently reported in wastewaters and surface waters. The authors found that electrochemical techniques are relevant not only to mimicking specific biotransformation reactions of organic contaminants but also to studying the oxidation reactions of organic contaminants of interest in water treatment. Tian et al. [2] investigated the effects of physico-chemical post-treatments of sewage sludge using ultrasonic, ultrasonic-ozone, and ultrasonic+alkaline methods. The results showed that the post-treatments were able to increase biogas production and decrease the amount of volatile solids in the final effluent. In the work by Pipiska et al. [3], the biosorption methods for pollution removal from wastewater were studied. Dried biomass of freshwater moss V. dubyana has been used as biosorbent for cationic dyes methylene blue and thioflavin T removal from both single and binary systems. Influence of a contact time, pH, and sorbate concentration on the dyes' removal efficiency has been investigated. The authors reported that an increase in pH has a positive effect on both thioflavin T and methylene blue sorption, and dye removal by moss V. dubyana is likely based on the electrostatic attraction. Another paper [4], dealing with wastewater treatment, studied and quantified the elimination of sunflower oil from wastewater influent using a biological treatment involving activated sludge. The findings revealed that the efficiency of the elimination of sunflower oil using a combination of biodegradation and flotation was 9...

Analysis of Non-Rainfall Periods and Their Impacts on the Soil Water Regime

“…The model 'GLOBAL' is a mathematical model to enable simulating water movement in soil and calculating the distribution of soil moisture potential, i.e. soil moisture in real time [7][8][9][10][11][12]. The model is based on the numerical solution of a nonlinear partial differential Richards' equation describing water movement in aerated soil zone, which is as follows:…”