<p> Prior to the passage of the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) 1.6 million bare steel Underground Storage Tanks (UST) were in use in the United States. Many of them were leaking. In Indiana approximately 13,000 UST remain but have been upgraded to meet current industry and regulatory standards. Cleaning up the petroleum releases from leaking UST has continued since it became evident that bare steel underground tanks leaked. In Northwest Indiana glacial moraine and outwash deposits from the Wisconsin Ice Age that retreated 10,000 years ago left 200 feet of glacial till above the underlying bedrock. Soil Vapor Extraction (SVE) and Air Sparging (AS) have proven to be effective and provide significant cost savings for remediation in the glacial deposits in Northwest Indiana. Indiana also has the Excess Liability Trust Fund (ELTF) to help pay for and to expedite clean-up of releases from registered UST. Cleaning up petroleum releases requires the appropriate technology for the localized geology, adequate funding, and appropriate guidance from state and federal regulations. This study discusses these issues at three sites in Northwest Indiana to demonstrate how technology, funding, and regulatory compliance must collaborate to work in the field.</p>

The catalytic oxidation of bisphenol A (BPA) by laccase (EC 1.10.3.2) has recently attracted considerable attention because laccase can rapidly transform potentially persistent and toxic pollutants such as bisphenol A in the presence of molecular oxygen. Direct treatment of wastewaters containing bisphenol A would require excessive amounts of laccase if the enzyme is lost with the effluent and, thus, treatment would be cost-prohibitive. Therefore, strategies are desired for retaining the enzyme in the treatment system. It was envisioned that this could be accomplished by extracting pollutants into a non-aqueous phase liquid and then treating them in that phase using enzymatic catalysis. In such a treatment scheme, preserving the enzyme and maintaining its high reactivity in a non-aqueous phase liquid can be easily achieved through the use of reverse micelles. / Therefore, this study was conducted in order to examine the efficiency of enzymatic treatment of BPA in reverse micelles. It was found that laccase entrapped in the reverse micelles formed by dioctyl sulfosuccinate sodium salt (AOT) and isooctane exhibited the highest catalytic activity at a pH of 6, a water content of 10 (i.e., the molar ratio of water to AOT), and an AOT concentration of 80 mM.

If spilled in significant quantities, non-aqueous phase liquids (NAPLs), such as gasoline, coal tar, and chlorinated solvents, will migrate downward through the subsurface. As the NAPL migrates through the soil or rock matrix, a significant fraction becomes 'trapped' due to capillary forces and may form pools above less permeable soil or rock layers. These 'trapped' NAPL globules and pools may partition into the groundwater and/or vapor phases, and serve as ongoing sources of contamination (i.e. source zones). Currently, the presence of NAPL in the subsurface is typically inferred from chemical analysis data. There are no techniques available for the direct observation of NAPLs entrapped inside soil aggregates or core samples. Furthermore, accurate, three-dimensional, and non-destructive NAPL characterization techniques are an important component of studies aimed at improving our understanding of NAPL movement, dissolution, and remediation. / In this study, experiments were conducted to demonstrate the capabilities and limitations of X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) to non-destructively quantify contaminants in soil columns.

All bush fires are patchy at some scale and to some degree. In their most obvious form, bush fire patches are unburnt islands of vegetation within a fire boundary. Bush fire patchiness is an important part of the fire regime, because it can affect ecological processes such as local extinction and recolonisation and can contribute to the post-fire resilience of populations of animals that need vegetation cover. During a fire, the survival of plants and animals can often depend on the degree of patchiness. Unburnt patches may therefore affect the post-fire dynamics of plant and animal populations. Continuity of fuel loads is a major contributor to bush fire behaviour including the intensity and rate spread of the fire. Further, the degree of patchiness is one measure of the effectiveness of a hazard-reduction fire in reducing fuel and thus modifying subsequent wildfire behaviour. An understanding of the patchiness of fires is of critical importance for landscape bush fire risk management. Quantifying patchiness is no simple task, partly because of the continuous range of scales at which patchiness occurs and partly because patches cannot always be readily detected by remote sensing techniques, especially in forested systems in which canopy scorch is not closely aligned with burning of the understorey. Moreover, remotely sensed data are expensive at the fine resolution required to detect the small scale patterns that are ecologically relevant (i.e. of the order of metres). In such systems, a method of rapidly assessing patchiness in the field is much needed. The first aim of this study was to develop a field technique for the quantification of patchiness. The second aim was to determine the effectiveness of the technique in estimating overall patchiness in a site, using a simulation model based on a range of known patch sizes and distributions. The third was to use field estimation of patchiness to investigate the environmental parameters that influence the patchiness of fires. A range of methods was assessed and transect sampling the post bush fire landscape using Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to produce a spatial model within a Geographic Information System (GIS) was found to be an accurate and simple method for assessing the patchiness of a fire. This method was time efficient and cost effective. It produced an output that provided a clear description of the overall patchiness of a site as well as the relative distribution of the sizes of the patches. The spatial model can display the distribution of proportion of areas burnt within the landscape. I tested the statistical effectiveness of this transect sampling method using spatial modelling within a GIS. I wrote a program to simulate thousands of transect samples on a range of different spatial arrangements of patches within a landscape. This simulation revealed that the minimum number of transects required to provide an estimate of the actual 'patchiness' is dependent on the type of fire and range between 5 and 10, to obtain 90% accuracy of the estimate of the patchiness. The empirical transect data from each site was used using GIS to develop a spatial model assessing the relative influences of a range of topographic and environmental variables on the patchiness of a fire. The relative influence of these variables was different for each fire. From this analysis, a map was produced from a GIS that described the spatial distribution of patchiness within a given fire. This transect data was graphed to indicate the relative distribution and abundance of unburnt patches. The studies performed indicate these methods have important applications for managing biodiversity and wildfires.

Failure to design, construct and remediate waste rock and tailings storage facilities at mine sites leads to adverse environmental degradation and unforeseen financial costs. Typical closure options for these facilities include barrier or store and release covers. This thesis investigates the use of reactive in-situ covers as an alternative engineering design approach that involves mixing reagents (e.g. BauxsolTM) with waste rock to neutralise acidity and to immobilise major and minor metals. It was unknown whether this approach could be achieved at a field scale, whether the use of BauxsolTM would achieve its primary objectives, whether there would be adverse effects on the soil chemistry or whether there would be adverse ecotoxicological problems.Four 400 m2 field trials were conducted at a mine site and included a Control; Bauxsol™ (25 kg / m2) plus biosolids (15 kg / m2); Lime (2.5 kg / m2) plus biosolids (15 kg / m2) and a fourth site that was encapsulated with 0.3 m of compacted clay and 0.1 m of topsoil. The results suggest that soil chemistry can be significantly improved by mixing Bauxsol™ with the top 0.5 m of the waste rock profile i.e., creating a reactive in situ cover. This was sufficient to create a root zone up to 1.6 m deep that had pH greater than 5 and lower concentrations of metals measured using a sequential extraction procedure. Treatment of the acid mine waste with Lime did not achieve marked improvement of soil conditions in soil layers below the amended zone. The capping treatment created a topsoil layer with higher pH, but the underlying mine soil remained unimproved. Leachate pH in the Control became increasingly acidic (pH 4.57 to pH 3.95). The addition of Lime and biosolids led to an initial increase in leachate pH, compared to the Control, however this decreased over the duration of the study (pH 5.37 to pH 4.89). In the Bauxsol™ and biosolids treatment leachate pH increased to 6.92 after the first rainfall event and continued to increase over the duration of the study to pH 7.4. After 24 months metal leachate concentrations (mg / L) in the lysimeters for Al, Cd, Cu, Mn and Zn were (Control: 32.6, 5.7, 12.7, 39.3, 121.8), (Bauxsol™: 0.07, 0.02, 0.07, 0.57, 0.23) and (Lime: 2.19, 1.19, 2.33, 3.6, 28.4). No leachate was available for collection from the Clay treatment indicating that this technique was functioning in terms of minimising the infiltration of water into the mine soil.Ecotoxicological studies of major and minor metals in eucalypt leaves from the field trials and earthworm bioaccumulation studies were undertaken. The Bauxsol™, Ca(OH)2 and Clay treatments in the field trials allowed good tree growth of four eucalypt species, compared to the Control. There was no statistical difference in tree growth between the Bauxsol™, Lime or Clay treatments over the two years of monitoring. However the growth of one tree species was poor in the Bauxsol™ treatment.Laboratory bioaccumulation assessments found that there was good motility and no mortality of the earthworm species E. fetida after 28 days exposure to metal loaded BauxsolTM. The bioaccumulation of metals in E. fetida and bioaccumulation factors were below reported toxicity thresholds to cause mortality and below reported bioaccumulation factors for moderately contaminated soils, indicating that the metals bound to the Bauxsol™ reagents are mostly non-bioavailable E. fetida. Analyses of the 20 % treatment at 28 days using a sequential extraction procedure showed that > 95 % of the metals are bound within the Fe / Mn oxide fractions. However, changes occurred in metal fractionation after exposure to E. fetida for Cd, Cr and Fe, Mn. The data also showed that the exchangeable (1M MgCl2) and the Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure extractant are useful as indicators of metal bioavailability to E. fetida.

All bush fires are patchy at some scale and to some degree. In their most obvious form, bush fire patches are unburnt islands of vegetation within a fire boundary. Bush fire patchiness is an important part of the fire regime, because it can affect ecological processes such as local extinction and recolonisation and can contribute to the post-fire resilience of populations of animals that need vegetation cover. During a fire, the survival of plants and animals can often depend on the degree of patchiness. Unburnt patches may therefore affect the post-fire dynamics of plant and animal populations. Continuity of fuel loads is a major contributor to bush fire behaviour including the intensity and rate spread of the fire. Further, the degree of patchiness is one measure of the effectiveness of a hazard-reduction fire in reducing fuel and thus modifying subsequent wildfire behaviour. An understanding of the patchiness of fires is of critical importance for landscape bush fire risk management. Quantifying patchiness is no simple task, partly because of the continuous range of scales at which patchiness occurs and partly because patches cannot always be readily detected by remote sensing techniques, especially in forested systems in which canopy scorch is not closely aligned with burning of the understorey. Moreover, remotely sensed data are expensive at the fine resolution required to detect the small scale patterns that are ecologically relevant (i.e. of the order of metres). In such systems, a method of rapidly assessing patchiness in the field is much needed. The first aim of this study was to develop a field technique for the quantification of patchiness. The second aim was to determine the effectiveness of the technique in estimating overall patchiness in a site, using a simulation model based on a range of known patch sizes and distributions. The third was to use field estimation of patchiness to investigate the environmental parameters that influence the patchiness of fires. A range of methods was assessed and transect sampling the post bush fire landscape using Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to produce a spatial model within a Geographic Information System (GIS) was found to be an accurate and simple method for assessing the patchiness of a fire. This method was time efficient and cost effective. It produced an output that provided a clear description of the overall patchiness of a site as well as the relative distribution of the sizes of the patches. The spatial model can display the distribution of proportion of areas burnt within the landscape. I tested the statistical effectiveness of this transect sampling method using spatial modelling within a GIS. I wrote a program to simulate thousands of transect samples on a range of different spatial arrangements of patches within a landscape. This simulation revealed that the minimum number of transects required to provide an estimate of the actual 'patchiness' is dependent on the type of fire and range between 5 and 10, to obtain 90% accuracy of the estimate of the patchiness. The empirical transect data from each site was used using GIS to develop a spatial model assessing the relative influences of a range of topographic and environmental variables on the patchiness of a fire. The relative influence of these variables was different for each fire. From this analysis, a map was produced from a GIS that described the spatial distribution of patchiness within a given fire. This transect data was graphed to indicate the relative distribution and abundance of unburnt patches. The studies performed indicate these methods have important applications for managing biodiversity and wildfires.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Nov. 19, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-02, Section: B, page: 0861. Adviser: Eduardo S. Brodizio.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University OF MICHIGAN.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University OF MICHIGAN.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University OF MICHIGAN. / CHAIRMAN: ROLF A. DEININGER.