Waste Management - Global

Debris and plastic litter found by Tangaroa Blue, an Australian Marine debris initiative, on Christmas Island, Australia in this undated handout. Tangaroa Blue/Handout via REUTERS

reuters.com - Alison Bevege - June 30, 2018

Australia’s biggest supermarket chains are scrambling to combat “bag rage” as frustrated shoppers vent their anger over the removal of single-use plastic bags . . .

. . . The union conducted a survey earlier this week and of 132 (employee) members who responded, 57 said they suffered abuse due to the plastic bag ban . . .

. . . The U.N. wants to eliminate single-use plastic by 2022 and says more than 60 countries have so far taken steps to ban or reduce plastic consumption.

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Freetown after Independence in 1961 up to the early seventies was a reasonably clean city. Local dump sites for garbage were strategically located all over the city and were regularly cleared out by either the City Council or the Ministry of Health. The City Council was then a vibrant entity focused on providing municipal services to the City. Drains were cleaned out regularly by Council or through the services of Contractors such as the late Ajibu Jalloh and others. Markets were washed through an arrangement with the Fire Force. 

submitted by Sarah Slaughter

The Field Deployable Hydrolysis System was designed, developed and fabricated by a government team to provide a transportable, high throughput neutralization system designed to convert chemical warfare materiel into compounds not usable as weapons.

defense.gov

The Field Deployable Hydrolysis System (FDHS) is a transportable, high-throughput modular demilitarization system designed to render chemical warfare materiel into compounds not usable as weapons. The system uses neutralization technology to destroy bulk chemical warfare agents and their precursors by heating and mixing with reagents, such as water, sodium hydroxide and sodium hypochlorite to facilitate chemical degradation resulting in a destruction efficiency of 99.9 percent. The neutralization process generates hazardous waste in volumes of five to 14 times the volume of chemical warfare materiel treated. This hazardous waste can then be commercially disposed of in accordance with host-nation environmental laws.

A pipe discharges factory waste water from the Shenhua coal-to-liquid project into a stream in the hills in Ordos in the inner Mongolia. Photograph: Qiu Bo/Greenpeace

Number of groundwater sites of poor or extremely poor quality increases to 59.6%, Chinese government says

theguardian.com - by Jonathan Kaiman - April 23, 2014

Nearly 60% of China’s underground water is polluted, state media has reported, underscoring the severity of the country’s environmental woes.

The country’s land and resources ministry found that among 4,778 testing spots in 203 cities, 44% had “relatively poor” underground water quality; the groundwater in another 15.7% tested as “very poor”.

Water quality improved year-on-year at 647 spots, and worsened in 754 spots, the ministry said.

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