Advanced Biopolymer-Based Nanocomposites and Hybrid Materials

Heavy metals are a group of metals and metalloids that includes transition metals, lanthanides, and actinides. When released into water, these elements have toxic effects on water quality and surface sediments, affecting environmental parameters such as pH and temperature. Therefore, metals that are harmful to aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems pose a significant threat to plants, animals, and human health. As such, there is increased interest in mitigating the harmful environmental impacts of heavy metals. This book provides a comprehensive overview of heavy metals, their impacts on water, soil, food crops, and cosmetics, and techniques for their remediation. It is organized into three sections: “Heavy Metals and Their Effects on the Environment,” “Evaluation of Heavy Metals and Their Risks to Irrigation Water,” and “Remediation of Heavy Metals.

This book discusses the historical context, country experience, and best practices that led to eliminating infectious diseases from the WHO’s South-East Asia Region, such as malaria, lymphatic filariasis, yaws, trachoma, and mother-to-child HIV in the mid-twentieth and twenty-first century. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (3.3) targets to end AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and neglected tropical diseases and combat hepatitis, water-borne diseases and other communicable diseases by 2030. In this context, this book is of high significance to countries from the SEA region and around the globe. It helps create national strategies and action plans on infectious disease elimination and thus attaining SDG 3.3. This is an open access book.

Introduction: Sustainable water and wastewater services are critical to providing the American public with clean and safe water and helping ensure the environmental, economic, and social sustainability of the communities that utilities serve. Utilities across the country face tremendous challenges, such as aging infrastructure, an aging workforce, increasing mandates, and competing priorities within the communities they serve. The purpose of this document is to assist utility leaders with implementing proven and effective practices over time to improve their operations and move toward sustainability, at a pace consistent with their needs and the needs of their communities. It provides utility leaders with a cohesive structure to help them address various challenges proactively and with confidence. The practices described in this document reflect the lessons learned and the practical experience utilities have derived as they have improved their operations. A utility can use this document to identify specific opportunities for improvement and draw on the example practices to create an individualized “roadmap” to more sustainable operations.

This review presents the developments in artificial intelligence technologies for environmental pollution controls. A number of AI approaches, which start with the reliable mapping of nonlinear behavior between inputs and outputs in chemical and biological processes in  terms of prediction models to the emerging optimization and control algorithms that study the  pollutants removal processes and intelligent control systems, have been developed for environmental clean-ups. The characteristics, advantages and limitations of AI methods, including single and hybrid AI methods, were overviewed. Hybrid AI methods exhibited synergistic effects, but with computational heaviness.