A Practical Guide to Environmental Crime Scene Investigations

Releasing contaminants into the environment whether deliberate or unintentional can be thought of as a crime against the environment. The role of environmental forensics is to identify and prevent environmental pollution, or crimes. Environmental Forensics Fundamentals: A Practical Guide examines this growing field, and provides environmental professionals looking to specialize in environmental forensics with the materials they need to effectively investigate and solve crimes against the environment."

Pointing the Finger at Environmental Crime"

Environmental forensics uses "fingerprinting" techniques in order to assess and analyze contamination sites. Fingerprinting can reveal the source of contamination, as well as how, where, and when the contamination was released. This handy guidebook outlines the proven techniques, applications, and resources needed to efficiently investigate environmental crimes and become successful in this emerging field."

Learn the Basics from a Single Source"

Divided into three main parts, the first part of the book examines the role of evidence in forensic investigations and court proceedings. It highlights general forensic concepts and offers guidelines for obtaining defensible evidence. The second part details environmental forensic investigative techniques. It includes a step-by-step guide that enables the reader to apply the techniques in practice. The final section covers strategy building. It presents real case studies, as well as key principles and concepts for strategy building, and addresses the most common challenges faced in environmental forensics.

Environmental Forensics Fundamentals: A Practical Guide provides information on cutting-edge scientific techniques that investigate the source and age of environmental pollution and solve environmental crimes. It examines the principles behind each main forensic technique. It also offers guidance on what to look for in order to successfully apply the techniques and interpret results. In addition, the author provides relevant sources where more information can be found."

Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology attempts to provide concise, critical reviews of timely advances, philosophy, and significant areas of accomplished or needed endeavor in the total field of xenobiotics in any segment of the environment, as well as toxicological implications.

"Field screening" indicates field analytical tools, and (quick) methods and strategies for on-site or in-situ environmental analysis and assessment of contamination. "Field screening" includes not only field analytical methods, such as mobile laboratories, portable analyses, detectors, sensors, or noninvasive techniques, but also reconnaissance strategies and problems of measurement in heterogeneous media, using, among others, new geotechnical and geophysical instruments.

This volume contains both oral and poster contributions to the Second International Conference on Strategies and Techniques for the Investigation and Monitoring of Contaminated Sites, "Field Screening Europe 2001," held in Karlsruhe, May 14 - May 16, 2001. As an integrated study of environmental contamination, "field screening" has become a more and more important part of environmental monitoring and the assessment of chemical contaminations. Recent developments are presented in these proceedings.

Audience Environmental engineers, geo-scientists, chemists, biologists, soil scientists, hydrologists and geophysicists.

Facing the challenges of globalization and ecology, the standards for economic, social and environmental performance of companies are becoming more demanding. This book shows what sustainable development means for the business community and presents best practice approaches in environmental management from Japan, the USA, Brazil and seven European countries. The book stresses that international competitiveness depends on the effective use of innovative management tools and has to be supported by an intelligent system of environmental regulation, that is, promoting innovation and eco-efficiency. Experts with many years of practical experience share their know-how on how to achieve excellency in environmental performance and present concrete steps towards a sustainable company.

By providing all the basic knowledge needed to assess how useful active noise control will be for a given problem, this book assists in the designing, setting up, and tuning of an active noise-control system. Written for students who have no prior knowledge of acoustics, signal processing, or noise control but who do have a reasonable grasp of basic physics and mathematics, the text is short and descriptive, leaving all mathematical details and proofs concerning vibrations, signal processing and the like to more advanced texts or research monographs. The book can thus be used in independent study, in a classroom with laboratories, or in conjunction with a kit for experiment or demonstration. Topics covered include basic acoustics, human perception and sound, sound intensity and related concepts, fundamentals of passive noise- control strategies, basics of digital systems and adaptive controllers, and active noise control systems.

In situ remediation techniques have experienced a boom over the last few years, thereby producing a wide range of valuable experiences. Their results have demonstrated that in situ techniques are a mature alternative to conventional remediation techniques. Irrespective of future policy developments, it is impossible to imagine future remediation practice without the use of in situ techniques. The book presents an overview of recent developments in the field of in situ soil remediation. The book is unique in that it is not a compilation of unrelated case studies. A conceptual approach has been chosen; remediation models described in this book are illustrated from a practical point of view. The authors present the Dutch way of treating contaminated land; The Netherlands is renowned for being at the forefront of remediation techniques as a result of the country's progressiveness and experience in this area.

The disturbance and recovery of arctic terrestrial ecosystems was the subject of a NATO Advanced Workshop held at the Arctic Centr, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland, in September 1995. The object of the meeting was to bring together researchers on arctic vegetation who share a concern for the preservation of arctic ecosystems. A particular aim of the meeting was to involve as many Russian colleagues as possible and to encourage younger scientists currently active in the Russian Arctic to come to Rovaniemi and make first-hand contact with colleagues from other countries with a view to planning further collaboration. This volume of papers therefore contains papers both from many younger researchers as well as from those who have been active in arctic plant ecology for many years. Disturbance is no new feature in the arctic environment. The factors that create the arctic habitat include marked climatic oscillations, physical disturbance and fluctuations in herbivore populations. The combination of environmental stress and disturbance from habitat instability and the possibility of periods of intense grazing imposes a particularly testing blend of adverse conditions for plant survival. The physical nature of the terrain with constant soil movement through cryoperturbation and solifluction contributes to the fragility of arctic habitats. To this scenario we must add disturbance by man in the unending quest for yet more natural resources, whether they be animal, vegetable or mineral or merely the concept of environmental experience, as in tourism.

Preface When you write a book like this after ten years' working as an environmental specialist, you end up with something that reflects your career. Of course, when I started working at the Ministry of the Environment in the Netherlands, I could not foresee that I would now be at TNO, nor that I would have performed research into chlorine, PVC, waste, etc. , that would come to form the basis for this book. But step by step, with some coincidence and with the support of several people - who were probably unaware of the crucial role that, with hindsight, they played - I arrived at a position where I could start to consider this enterprise. At this point I shall try something dangerous - thanking a few of those people who gave that support. At the same time, it is obvious that I cannot mention them all. I hope that those whom I do not mention will forgive me. A first, crucial moment in this sequence of events came quite soon after I joined TNO in 1990. Just a few weeks later, all the senior staff in my section decided to leave in order to set up their own company. I decided to stay at TNO. As a consequence, I had to manage it on my own.

Political pressure has translated into legislation requiring industry to reduce waste. There is an unprecedented opportunity for chemists to develop and apply new methods that result in waste reduction, and this book describes examples of new chemical methods used to reduce waste at source and to treat toxic waste.

How does the state separate music from noise? How can such filtering apparatus shape the content and form of sound production in the city? As a marker of co-presence to the hearing body, sound is always open to (or rather opens up) the politics of shared existence. In the throes of the post-dictatorship period, Brazil's legislative and executive branches implemented a series of sweeping measures to address quality of life concerns, including environmental pollution and urban inequality. In Sao Paulo, noise control became a recurrent controversy, growing in size and scale between the 1990s and 2010s. Together with the much-debated fear of crime and the socioeconomic and cultural tensions between the rich urban center and the poor peripheries, such ecological agendas against noise as a harmful pollutant have reconfigured the presence of environmental sounds in the city. In this book, Cardoso argues that the framing of specific sounds as unavoidable, unnecessary, or as harmful "noise" has been an effective strategy to organize spaces and administer group behavior in this rapidly expanding city. He focuses on two interrelated processes. First, the series of institutional regulatory mechanisms that turn sounds into the all-embracing "noise" susceptible to state intervention. Second, the constant attempts of interested groups in either attaching or detaching specific sounds (musical events, industrial noise, traffic noise, religious sounds, etc.) from regulatory scrutiny. Sound-politics is the dynamics that emerges from both processes - the channels through which sounds enter (and leave) the sphere of state regulation.

In September 1985, NATO sponsored an Advanced Study WOl'kshop entitled, "Noise-Induced Hearing Loss: Basic and Applied Aspects." Tne meeting was held in a mountain retreat near Lucca, Italy and was attended by scientists, clinicians, and public officials from 12 countries. This was the third in a series of such conferences organized by the authors. The first two were supported by the United States National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health; their proceedings were published as "The Effects of Noise on Hearing" in 1976 and "New Perspectives on Noise-Induced Hearing Loss" in 1982. The Organizing Committee approached NATO because it was felt that the problem of noise was common to all industrialized countries and was an especially serious problem for the military. Thus, the NATO sponsorship and the Italian site of the meeting were part of the Organizing Committee's plan to obtain an international and thorough repr'esentation on the problem of noise-induced hearing loss. The NATO meeting and proceedings followed the format of the previous two symposia with an initial focus on the anatomical and physiological disturbances resulting from noise-induced hearing loss. This was followed by sections devoted to studies of a more applied nature involving general auditory performance in noise, issues associated with the establishment of noise-exposure criteria, nonauditory effects of noise, and the interaction of noise with other agents.

In 1969 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization established the Committee on the Challenges of Hodern Society. Air Pollution was from the start one of the priority problems under study within the framework of the pilot studies undertaken by this Committee. The organization of a yearly symposium dealing with air pollution modeling and its application is one of the main activities within the pilot study in relation to air pollution. After being organized for five years by the United States and for five years by the Federal Republic of Germany, Belgium, repre sented by the Prime Minister's Office for Science Policy Programming, became responsible in 1980 for the organization of this symposium. This volume contains the papers presented at the 12th Interna tional Technical Meeting on Air Pollution Modeling and its Appli cation held at SRI International, Menlo Park, California in the USA from 25th to 28th August 1981. The meeting was jointly organized by the Prime Minister's Office for Science Policy Programming, Belgium and SRI International, USA. The conference was attended by 109 participants and 51 papers have been presented. The members of the selection committee of the 12th I.T.M. were A. Berger (Chair man, Belgium), W. Klug (Federal Republic of Germany), L.E. Niemeyer (United States of America), L. Santomauro (Italy), J. Tikvart (United States of America), M.L. Williams (United Kingdom), H. Van Dop (The Netherlands), C. De Wispelaere (Coordinator, Belgium)."

Excessive noise levels are generally acknowledged to have adverse effects on our environment. Studies indicate that excessive noise levels can cause fatigue in exposed individuals, lower efficiency and productivity, impaired speech communication, and hearing loss. Excessive noise is almost everywhere today - in the office, in schools, hospitals and other institutional facilities, in all classes of public buildings, and in our factories. INDUSTRIAL NOISE High noise levels in factories can make speech communication in the plant difficult and at times impossible. Foremen are often unable to hear warning shouts from co-workers. The problem of hearing loss due to excessive noise exposure is of particular concern to industry, and to the federal government. In the early 1970s, the United States Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) which sets criteria for health hazards and established limits for noise exposure of industrial workers. The OSHA Noise Standard was amended in 1982 to require audiometric testing of all employees exposed to noise levels of 85 dB or above for eight hours. A NOISE IN COMMERCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL BUILDINGS While noise levels in offices, stores, schools, and other commercial and institutional buildings seldom reach those encountered in many industrial environments, they often reach levels which are distracting to the occupants of such buildings. Impairment of speech communica tion among workers, or inversely the lack of speech privacy, are both deterrents to effiCiency and productivity and are detrimental to the occupants' comfort and sense of well-being."

This book has been written to provide an intro Chapter 2 deals with the mechanism of hear duction to the fundamental concepts of sound ing and the subjective rating of sound, includ and a comprehensive coverage whereby un ing age-related and noise-induced hearing loss. wanted sound (noise) can be controlled. Al Assessment of any noise problem involves a though there are many notable textbooks which knowledge of the instrumentation available for deal primarily with the physics (or theory) of measurements, the limitations of this instru sound, and others which treat noise control in mentation, the appropriate procedures for mak a strictly practical (and sometimes even empir ing the measurements with the instrumentation, ical) manner, there are few textbooks that pro and the methods by which the measured data vide a bridging between the necessary under can be analyzed. Chapter 3 provides an up-to standing of the fundamentals of sound (its date coverage of these requirements, including generation, propagation, measurement) and the a section on one of the newest and most valu application of these fundamentals to its control. able tools in noise studies-sound intensity This book provides that link. measurement. The capability of being able to The text presents noise control primarily at measure sound intensity as compared with con the introductory level."

Man is the best thing in the World. Nature does nothing uselessly. Aristotle There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more. John Burroughs The basic purpose of development is to enlarge people's choices. The objective of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives. Mahbub ul Hag Founder of the Human Development Report Theaimofthisbookis toprovidea compiledset ofconcepts,principles,methods and issues used for studying, designing and operating human-minding and natu- minding automation and industrial systems. The depth of presentation is suf?cient for the reader to understand the problems involved and the solution approaches, and appreciate the need of human-automation cooperative interaction, and the - portance of the efforts required for environment and ecosystem protection during any technological and development process in the society. Humans and technology are living and have to live together in a sustainable society and nature. Humans must not be viewed as components of automation and technology in the same way as machines. Automation and technology must incorporate the humans' needs and preferences, and radiate "beauty" in all ways, namely functionally, technically and humanistically. In overall, automation and technology should create comfort and give pleasure.

Is economic growth good for the environment? A number of economists have claimed that economic growth can benefit the environment, recruiting political support and finance for environmental policy measures. This view has received increasing support since the early 1990s from empirical evidence that has challenged the traditional environmentalist's belief that economic growth degrades the environment. This book reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on growth and the environment, giving an in-depth empirical treatment of the relationship between the two. Various hypotheses are formulated and tested for a number of indicators of environmental pressure. The test results indicate that alternative models and estimation methods should be used, altering previous conclusions about the effect of economic growth on the environment and offering an insight into the forces driving emission reduction in developed countries.

Chemically contaminated land has only recently been recognized as an immediate or long-term potential hazard, and published guidance on how to tackle such land has been sparse. Indeed much of the available technical work emphasizes the risks and dangers, rather than indicating safe and economical strategies of reclamation. This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the important aspects of land reclamation. Its basic aim is to dispel the myths that have become associated with the subject and to indicate methods and strategies that can be used for safe and economical reclamation. The authors concentrate on the more important facets of reclamation and indicate where advice and information is more or less certain. As in any newly developed field there are still uncertainties and, for this reason, not all the chapters contain equivalent amounts of detail. All the authors have expertise in the field of land reclamation, and differences in emphasis between authors reflect the present state of the subject. Overall, the book emphasizes that contaminated land can be reclaimed safely provided that sufficient attention is paid to detail and that the proposed end use of the land is appropriate and based on a detailed knowledge of the site.

This text of applied chemistry considers the interface between chemistry and chemical engineering, using examples of some of the important process in dustries. Integrated with this is detailed consideration of measures which may be taken for avoidance or control of potential emissions. This new emphasis in applied chemistry has been developed through eight years of experience gained from working in industry in research, development and environment al control fields, plus twelve years of teaching here using this approach. It is aimed primarily towards science and engineering students as well as to envi ronmentalists and practising professionals with responsibilities or an interest in this interface. By providing the appropriate process information back to back with emis sions and control data, the potential for process fine-tuning is improved for both raw material efficiency and emission control objectives. This approach also emphasizes integral process changes rather than add-on units for emis sion control. Add-on units have their place, when rapid action on an urgent emission problem is required, or when control simply is not feasible by pro cess integral changes alone. Obviously fundamental process changes for emission containment are best conceived at the design stage. However, at whatever stage process modifications are installed, this approach to control should appeal to the industrialist in particular, in that something more sub stantial than decreased emissions may be gained."

The determination of the hazards resulting from the accidental or deli berate contamination of terrestrial and aquatic environments is in most countries still lirnited to the detection and quantification of the suspected pollutants by chemical analyses. Such an approach is unfortunately hampered by the following constraints : the costs as weil as the technical difficulties of analyzing every individual chemical which may be present in the sampies, and the difficulty of assessing the hazards and risks of environmental contaminations from a set of chemical data. During the last decades the scientific and regulatory community has gradually realized that biological methodologies have to be taken into consideration for an ecologically meaningful assessment of the toxicological hazards of contaminants. Effect evaluations obtained with biological techniques indeed integrate the impact of all the contaminants to which living biota are exposed. Bioassays with selected test species representative for the biological commumtles of the environments under consideration, are now applied more or less regularly to determine toxic and genotoxic effects. Taking into account the species specific and chemical specific character of toxicity to biota, the necessity of a "battery of tests" approach with species of different trophic levels is currently also generally accepted and implemented. It is dear that a balanced partnership between chemical, biological, toxicological and microbiological analyses is always the best strategy for generating the broadest information base on environmental hazards.

This book provides a basis by which instruments and transducers can be selected, assembled and integrated with a computer to measure and control physical processes in an accurate and predictable manner. It consists of two parts, the first of which lays the theoretical foundation for the second. First the Fourier analysis of signals are summarized. Then, from a systems point of view, the following chapters introduce the important aspects of filters, amplifiers and analog-to-digital converters. The second half of the book first discusses in depth the importance of the timing of the computer with its instruments, transducers and actuators. It then summarizes the physical and functional aspects of transducers and actuators and gives numerous detailed examples of how they can be integrated into computer controlled experiments and processes.

This book is designed to help scientifically astute non-specialists understand basic geophysical and computational fluid dynamics concepts relating to oil spill simulations, and related modeling issues and challenges. A valuable asset to the engineer or manager working off-shore in the oil and gas industry, the authors, a team of renowned geologists and engineers, offer practical applications to mitigate any offshore spill risks, using research never before published.

Contributors from twenty-two nations address various projects in their native countries to either develop, demonstrate, or facilitate the adoption of cleaner technologies and cleaner products. Reviewing the environmental situation in their respective countries and discussing the development and adoption of pollution prevention technologies, the authors provide thought-provoking and incisive treatments of the subject. An extremely comprehensive index enables the reader to retrieve focus on the information of interest quickly and efficiently.

The aim of this book is to link demand and supply of environmental information in the field of Life Cycle Management. The book is based on the results of the CHAINET concerted action financed by EU-DGXII for the work period 1998-2000, and is intended to build bridges between the different scientific communities in the field of Life Cycle Management. A structured approach is followed, meaning that both demand and supply of environmental information are characterised, after which the two are linked.
Chapter 2 deals with the demand side; a number of characteristics are identified including the object of analysis, different question types, consecutive decision steps, and the cultural context of the decision at hand. Chapter 3 gives an overview of the supply side, distinguishing between concepts, analytical tools, procedural tools, technical elements, and data. The focus of the book is on analytical tools. In Chapter 4 and in a 34-page annex, eleven analytical tools are systematically described, including LCA, MIPS, ERA, MFA, SFA, CERA, IOA, analytical tools for ecodesign, LCC, TCA, and CBA.
In Chapter 5, demand and supply are linked, starting from the question types and indicating which types of tools are particularly suited for which type of question. For instance, it is shown that LCA is particularly useful for operational questions, but less so for more strategic questions. Other aspects concern the distinction between a broad overview and a detailed analysis, and, interestingly, the cultural context of the decision. It appears that without agreement on the criteria to be used, quantitative analytical tools such as LCA, ERA, or CBA may not be very helpful as support for decision-making. Rather more robust quantitative, or even qualitative, tools may then be used instead.
Chapter 6 makes a number of concluding remarks. A plea is made for the combined use of tools, rather than the development of a super tool. Another important topic concerns the customisation of tools, which is seen as quite useful if combined with a periodic validation against a more detailed analysis.
In the text of the preceding chapters, 26 text boxes are included as practical illustrations of the principles described in the text. In the following chapters, three cases are presented, dealing with electronic goods, the car, and clothes washing. These cases show how, in practice, different tools are used in combination, as a support for a given decision situation.
The book is particularly suited for courses in higher education, both for universities and polytechnics, and for use by consultancy firms, by larger companies, and industrial branch organisations.