Assessment of Industrial and Man-Made Hazards Due to Chemicals

Dear Colleagues,

Pollution and its related impact on the planet is increasing and can seriously damage human health, biodiversity, and the entire life on the planet. Chemicals can be released into the environment by natural events, but in the last century, chemical pollution has been mainly caused by human activities (industry, intensive agriculture and farming, waste disposal, and transports). Generalized chemical pollution has been always considered the unavoidable consequence of industrial development, and today, high levels of generalized pollution are also impacting developing countries. Localized pollution can be due to industrial accidents, natural events affecting industrial plants, anthropic activities, or can be the result of organized crime.

Hazard refers to any source of potential damage, harm or adverse effects on something or someone, such as humans, animals, and environmental organisms. Hazard assessment is the procedure of identification of hazards, detection of their potential receptors, and determination of their potential consequences on living beings.

Hazard Identification can be considered the first step of a risk assessment procedure and mainly consists in the characterization/identification of sources. As regards chemicals, hazard assessment also requires the quantitative evaluation of contamination, by characterization/identification of the pollutants in each environmental compartment and the detection of correlations among them. It finally requires the comparison of field or inferred/calculated concentrations at the receptor, with defined law limit values in order to assess the potential mortality, inhibition or toxicologic effects.

The aim and scope of this Special Issue is to attract works where new insights for the assessment of industrial and man-made hazards due to chemicals are proposed.

Papers on methods and solutions dealing with both direct and inverse problems are encouraged: Simplified dynamic models (analytical approximated or surrogate, stochastic or data-based) to predict the fate and transport of reactive chemicals (PAH, heavy metals, pesticides, PCBs, particulate, emerging contaminants) in the environmental compartments as groundwater and soil, seawater, surface water and air are welcome; methodologies for the identification of pollutant sources using field data analysis and clustering (operating databases of oil and gas and chemical plants, remote sensing data and data coming from monitoring campaigns) and statistical methods to treat and reduce uncertainty in evaluating potential damage and adverse effects are particularly encouraged. This Special Issue also seeks original contributions on mapping and characterization of contaminated sites and optimal design of monitoring campaigns, also with low-cost sensors and biosensors; monitoring activities in intensive farming and agriculture sites, in harbors and seawater, and prior/post monitoring for new industrial settlements. Works on early warning detection, low-cost sensor networks, and automatic samplers to detect and manage hazardous chemicals are also encouraged. Papers on complex solved cases of hazard assessment where results are apparently difficult to explain are also welcome, as are case studies on interesting contaminants as nanoparticles and microplastics.

Prof. Dr. Ombretta Paladino
Guest Editor

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• Polluting source identification
• Polluting source characterization
• Mapping of contaminated sites
• Monitoring techniques
• Design of monitoring campaigns
• Field data analysis
• Field data clustering
• Effects on organisms
• Sensor networks
• Intensive farming
• Intensive agriculture
• Harbour contamination
• Dynamic models
• Fate and transport
• Reacting chemicals
• Early warning
• PAH
• Heavy metals
• PCBs
• PCDDs
• Pesticides
• Emerging contaminants
• Nanoparticles
• Microplastics