1. Environmental Policy and Law

What I have learned about environmental policy is that always, in the all world, there is an approach for the Environment. First with policy for nomad society, than, nowadays, with national laws, international treats and conventions.

The aim of those environmental policies is always to regulate the use for people to protect resources, without taking into account legal borders, but stressing on the needs of political structures, legal frameworks, relations and programmes, all of them pointing on future environmental resources and keeping biodiversity quite controlled.

UNO is playing a fundamental role on this problem at very high international level, not only collecting information by Nations, but also with a policy support (with Global Environmental Facilities) and with financial support (with World Bank, countries donors).

All the protocols presented during the seminars, and so on, that give some principles to actions and goals, belong from an important convention, the Agenda 21, a programme of actions for sustainable development.

Other important treaties and conventions are Cartagena Protocol (on biosafety), Kyoto Protocol (on Climate Change), UNCCD (to combat desertification), CBD (biodiversity convention) and Water Framework Directive (2000).

All those international convention recognize physical, biological and also socio-economic aspects of the environment and give principles to protect, to prevent and to be also precautionary.

However, the effort to do practically what the conventions suggest, and what many Nations ratify, should be keep in touch with the scientific data. In fact there will be a close circle link between scientific research on the environment and policy as well, especially in order to reach a balance for economic development, human health and environmental conditions.

In my phd research case, for I will study the presence of dust over the Mediterranean region, could be interesting search an interaction between the presence of dust and temperature of the sea surface, that could affect the presence of phytoplankton, the major source of food for aquatic species. But also investigate the interaction between the presence of dust and the variation of the local rainfall, or the interaction of dust presence and human breathing problems. Hopefully the results should be useful for policy makers.

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2. Air Pollution

Air pollution in general is a worldwide problem, without political borders, because it happens at different spatial and temporal scales and is affected by global atmosphere circulations. Increase of air pollution could increase presence of acid rains, photochemical smog, the hozone hole, greenhouse gases and the presence of health effects not only because of the greater UV presence, but also for the Particle Matter presence.

The pollutants that are more important for people are NOx, soot, CO, SO2, heavy metals, dust, benzene, Pb, PM2.5 and PM10.

The goal to control air quality could be reached studying the pollution sources, the dispersion with atmospheric model, the chemical reactions occurring and also the study of air depositions.

Important emissions inventories are CORINAIR, EMEP, IPCC that normalize the estimation of emissions for all the countries. A dispersion atmospheric model is need because weather could affect the dispersion of the pollutants in the atmosphere. Stable or unstable conditions should be the meaning of more or less pollutants concentration. The quantification of atmospheric effects could be calculated with chemical transport models (CHIMERE), the inputs will be initial conditions, meteorological conditions and emissions, the dispersion model will take into account chemical and physical transformations and the outputs will be pollutants concentrations.

CAFÉ and the Framework Air Directive give basic principles as how the air quality should be assessed and managed and list all the pollutants concentrations that should be monitored. The Limit value (VL) is a value to not overpass, the Target value (VA) is a common value for human health, the Alert Threshold (LA) is a value that, when measured, the population have to be informed about, in order to protect herself. The measures to be taken to decrease pollutions should be various, control of dust, forest fires, marine salt, control local industries and traffic sources, from land and overwater.

That seminar was very interesting for my research programme, because stress the attention on general air pollution problems, and I will study a detail part of air pollutants, dust from the Sahara desert region, that reach the Mediterranean region and affect in somehow rain, temperature and also human health.

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                        3. Waste Management

There are many separation methods for plastics recycling; gravity separation processe such as Dense Medium Separation is one of the one presented. DMS could be done in water, in salt solutions, in alcoholic solutions etc. advantages of DMS for plastic waste are: centrifugal acceleration that allows high sensitivity to density difference of plastics; labels can be removed easy from plastics; short treatments time; and High separation efficiency. Disadvantages are that some solutions, such salt, imply corrosion and other problems.

Two methods were presented, Hydroclyclone and Tri-Flo separators, this second was presented as the best because of the more stages in which the plastic could be separated and the efficiency as well is improved.

Then the attention was stressed on dredged materials. In Italy the 3% of soil is polluted, and the characterization of that kind of material (chemical analysis of material, how it is distributed etc) is very important to know the problem of contaminants and to search for a cure.

Treatments of contaminated dredged material are: ripening, biological, thermal and physical treatments.

It is very important also car or vehicle recycling. The importance of what parts of the vehicle can be recycled and in what way (steel and aluminium compounds are decreasing in car construction, polymers are growing).

Relevant aspects of car recycling are: changing composition and increasing complexity of vehicles. So it is important to improve the recycling rate of cars either in design (more dismantling cars), than in dismantling processes.

Thermal process is probably the best for fluss, even in Italy is not already permitted.

For the entire recycling the idea is to combine various methods, partial dismantling, thermal treatments and mechanical pre-treatments.

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4. Biodiversity

What I learn from that seminar is that mainly take care of life on Earth is extremely difficult, because of constant industrial and social development and increasing economics aspects.

Biodiversity is a new term that indicates biological diversity in a genetic, species, ecological and functional way. Biodiversity is a characterization of all life on Earth, from the beginning to nowadays.

Each biological life exists in a different ecosystem, named biome. There are different biomes at different latitudes, altitudes and climates of the entire world. It is amazing how many kind of species there are in the world, and most it’s amazing that we are not able to perfectly count all of them, because of the amount and of the quickly extinctions.

The main causes of the reduction of species are habitats deconstruction (like clear forest), overharvesting (ex. fish), commercial products and live specimens, predator and pest control, invasive and alien species, diseases, pollution (it seems that Italian and also Sardinian bees decreased in numbers for atmospheric industrial and traffic pollution), climate change and genetic assimilation. After the reduction of species there is extinction, some kind of solutions exist, above all it is the application of the preservative principle, often named during this September seminars discussions.

However it is important to protect wild area, to protect and form natural parks, to control animal and plants trade, to educate the new generations to protect the environment as they take care of their own lives, to enforce laws, to apply Kyoto protocol and of course to study the problem in a scientific method in order to determine the proportions of the problem.

Some financial instruments are very important to protect biodiversity, like the land purchase by rich and VIP donors, the use of fees for companies exploiting natural resources and the restoration of equivalent sites when one is needed (ex. to built a road), to do patent agreements with local communities to exploit resources for drug use, because the most of them didn’t earn from drugs, but great company did and do.

This seminar was a very rude and dramatic show of Biodiversity on Earth and how many mistakes man did and do on it.

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5. Bioremediation

Microorganisms are very important to provide cure and environment conservation.

No one could calculate how many cells there are over the Earth, but the importance of studying any type of microorganisms that could be able to degrade soil, oil spills or other contaminants is achieved.

In Russia many parts of soil is contaminated by oil extraction and transport and have to be regenerated.

There are two important ways to characterized contaminations: a local or a dispersive one, a natural or anthropogenic one. Remediation is a method that links together molecular biology, genetics, microbiology, engineering, ecology, environmental science. Oil spills could be degraded using biostimulation, biopreparations of indigenous plants, engineering techniques and monitoring contaminated zone.

Another important method is phytoremediation. Some plants can be used to degrade contaminants in soil, but we must be careful, because some plants can accumulate heavy metals and that can be dangerous for the environment and human health. But plant-microbial interactions can be useful for agriculture' grows, and the relations between plants and microorganisms over its root is very interesting.

Plasmids are important parts of certain kind of microorganisms that can be able to improve capacity of cells to degrade contaminants. There is in fact a constant evolution of microorganisms to adapt at a soil, and so it would be realised a good balance between right and wrong interaction on the environment.

Methods of improvements of degrader microorganisms, like mutagenesis and selection, genetic engineering in vitro, protein engineering, molecular breeding, use of plasmids for genetic manipulation in vitro, are regulated much more in Europe ( Cartagena protocol on Biosafety) than in USA.

For me was interesting this seminar on bioremediation of contaminated soil, it comes in my mind a kind of remediation on polluted air in such a way, probably it is very far from legislation and from possible health interactions, but it is very interesting for soil, because by now in some cases remediation is well applied, but isn’t a common use of nation.

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6. Pollution abatement

Taking into account the great variety of pollutants sources, there are measures, or laws, or conventions, it depends on the Nations, to prevent and to cure pollutants emissions.

During the first part of the seminar were presented some definitions of pollutants categories, then some idea of European policy with thematic strategy (such as CAFÉ, already saw in environmental law seminar).

The main pollutants sources are: Natural, Solvent use, Agriculture, Industry, Traffic.

The primary pollutants showed were CO, NOx, SOx, PM, TSH, HC, VOC, C6H6, PAH, CO2.

For the PM classifications, mainly because particle matter is interesting for my dust research, we can use the aerodynamic diameter (ex: PM10 with diameter equal or less than 10 µm or PM2.5 with diameter equal or less than 2.5 µm) or the Tri-Modal distributions (ultrafine, fine and coarse), but always a dimension classification, not a chemical one, because it could be more expensive. PM could affect deeply human health and the reduced dimensions could reach deepest recesses of lungs and cause a series of respiratory diseases.

PM emissions sources are seaspray, soil moved by wind, biogenic aerosols, volcanic emissions, forest fires, and anthropogenic sources. PM from vehicle, cars, transportation should be more controlled and measured, not only the land one, but also vessel, or shipping transport and aviation transport.

The EU legislation give limits for mobile emission, there are many the Euro x limitation for private cars (gasoline and diesel).

To control the road transport emissions there is a common trend of modification of the engines technology, the reduction of traffic in big city centre, the use of Pb and S free fuel, the promotion of the use of renewable energy and the use of alternative fuel. A cure strategy is post combustion treatment.

The importance of diesel engine and the main problem related to that fuel is PM emission, a mixture of solid and liquid emission. Were presented some different kind of engines and catalysts based on different physical and mechanical properties that are used to decrease PM emissions. Three Way Catalyst is capable of efficiency, NSR catalyst is capable to storage NOx on a BaO support and the Diesel Particulate Filter (honeycomb) is the best to reduce particulate emissions from diesel engine.

Either the vessel traffic is important, first because, if traffic over land have a decreasing trend, boat traffic have an opposite growing trend. Some important measures should be took, engine modification, the use of low S fuel and shore side electricity.