Reverse Logistics in the Electronics Waste Industry

Recently, due to the rapid world population growth, decreasing of natural resources and raw materials, increasing environmental awareness, interesting for wasting raw materials, using produced products more efficiently, and reusing of sources is rapidly increasing. Nowadays, reverse logistics as an important business strategy for profitable and sustainability is becoming important. The effective implementation of reverse logistics gives companies a competitive advantage in sectors. Due to mentioned reasons firms intend to incorporate reverse logistics activities such as the recovery, remanufacturing, recycling or disposal. Reverse logistics has become increasingly important as a profitable and sustainable business strategy. Therefore, more and more manufacturers have adapted the practice of recovering value from returned products and integrate product recovery activities into their processes. The electronic industry is one of the fastest growing manufacturing industries and the main purpose of this chapter is to explore the opportunities for waste returns within this sector.

Novel Bioremediation Methods in Waste Management

Bioremediation technologies are one of the novel methods in the field of waste and environment management and are presently gaining immense credibility for being eco-compatible. Bioremediation using microbes has been well accepted as an environment friendly and economical treatment method for disposal of hazardous petroleum hydrocarbon contaminated waste (oily waste). Besides this, earthworms can be used to extract toxic heavy metals, including cadmium and lead, from solid waste from domestic refuse collection and waste from vegetable and flower markets. Other novel methods used recently for treatment of wastes are plasma incineration or plasma assisted gasification and pyrolysis technology. The technologies applied for conditioning include ultrasonic degradation, chemical degradation, enzyme addition, electro-coagulation and biological cell destruction. Genetic engineering is another method for improving bioremediation of heavy metals and organic pollutants. Transgenic plants and associated bacteria constitute a new generation of genetically modified organisms for bioremediation.

Access to Safe Drinking Water

The focus of this chapter is to demonstrate that providing safe drinking water to communities in Majority World countries, specifically Kenya, Africa, is easily accomplished. Any water system, in order to be successfully constructed in impoverished Majority World communities, must be simple and inexpensive and the benefiting community must have a vested interest and ownership for the system to be effective. Establishing a vested interest by water recipients requires that the people providing the water purification technology understand the culture and worldview of the water system recipients. This approach is supported by literature review but more so by empirical evidence gathered by both authors.

Occurrence and Treatment of Micropollutants in Landfill Leachate

Micropollutants have emerged as a new challenge to the scientific community over the past decade. This chapter discusses the occurrence of various micropollutants in landfill leachate. Phthalic acid esters (PAEs) are one of the most investigated compounds in landfill leachate and are therefore given special focus in this chapter. The potential treatment options for these micropollutants are discussed with relevance to the estrogenicity potential of micropollutants. The potential of leaching of micropollutants from landfill sites is discussed to emphasize on the requirements of appropriate liners to avoid such exposure to the surrounding environment. Biological treatment in particular membrane bioreactors have been successfully used to remove some of the micropollutants. Advanced oxidation processes such Fenton and photo-Fenton have limited application reported in literature whereas other physic-chemical processes such as coagulation and adsorption have been demonstrated to be effective in the removal of micropollutants.

Application of Potential Biological Agents in Green Bioremediation Technology

Upgradation and advancement in every field related to mankind leads to the origin of a contaminated environment. Development in science and technology enabled humans to combat the rate of contaminants by using biological agents, commonly known as bioremediation. The chapter deals with the different species of bioremediation agents viz. bacteria, fungi, algae, plants, animals and organic wastes to treat diverse environmental pollution. The extent of environmental bioremediation encompasses inorganic viz. arsenic, chromium, mercury, cyanide etc. and organics viz. Hydrocarbons, petroleum, pesticides etc. Thus, the reasons for the control of water and soil by considering bioremediation are concern on public health, protection of environment, and cost reduction of decontamination. Different case studies have been demonstrated herein to understand the enigmatic process and evaluate practical efficacy of the environment to decontaminate itself by the presence of various biological organisms.

Treatment of Landfill Leachate by Anammox Process

In most cases, the anammox process is used for nitrogen removal from reject water coming from dewatering of digested sludge. However, there are more industrial streams suitable for treatment by partial nitritation/anammox process. The landfill leachate may be a good example of such wastewater. Generally, landfilling is the most used solution for treatment of urban solid wastes. The problem with landfill leachate production and management is one of the most important issues associated with the sanitary landfills. These streams are highly contaminated wastewater with a complex mixture of organic and inorganic compounds and characterized by a high ammonia content and low biodegradable organic fraction matter. The objective of this chapter is the short characteristic of landfill leachate and a short review of its treatment methods with special focus on nitrogen removal by partial nitritation/anammox process.

Utilization of SVM, LSSVM and GP for Predicting the Medical Waste Generation

The prediction of wastes generated in the hospital will help their management for several activities like storage, transport and disposing. This chapter adopts Support Vector Machine (SVM), Least Square Support Vector Machine (LSSVM) and Genetic Programming (GP) in order to estimate the rate of medical waste generation. In the event of predicting the rate, type of hospital, capacity and bed occupancy has been used as inputs of SVM, LSSVM and GP. SVM is based on statistical learning theory, which provides an elegant tool for nonlinear system modeling. LSSVM is the re-formulation to the general SVM. GP, a best part of evolutionary algorithm and also the specification of Genetic Algorithm (GA). These SVM, LSSVM and GP have been used as the regression techniques. The results show the performance of the developed SVM, LSSVM and GP models were elegant and outstanding.

Polymer Consumption, Environmental Concerns, Possible Disposal Options, and Recycling for Water Treatment

The increasing awareness of the environment has raised so much concerns in the way we live and the manner to which we dispose our waste. The rapid growth in polymer production has resulted in increasing concerns about the consumption of nonrenewable resources and the environmental impacts associated with its production and disposal. Polymer waste is one of the major components in municipal solid waste and is increasingly becoming a huge burden in industrialized nations. The rise in the use of plastic, coupled with increasing concerns about its disposal, has led to a renewed interest in its recycling and recovery. The technologies involved in the recovery and recycling of polymers are rapidly growing, however, there is no specific pattern of treating polymer waste. The technology depends on the type of material used in the production and consumption pattern. This chapter, therefore, discusses the patterns of polymer consumption, the environmental concerns, and different modes of recycling polymer waste.

Water Quality Prediction Using Statistical Tool and Machine Learning Algorithm

Water is the most valuable natural resource for all living things and the ecosystem. The quality of groundwater is changed due to change in ecosystem, industrialisation, and urbanisation, etc. In the study, 60 samples were taken and analysed for various physio-chemical parameters. The sampling locations were located using global positioning system (GPS) and were taken for two consecutive years for two different seasons, monsoon (Nov-Dec) and post-monsoon (Jan-Mar). In 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 pH, EC, and TDS were obtained in the field. Hardness and Chloride are determined using titration method. Nitrate and Sulphate were determined using Spectrophotometer. Machine learning techniques were used to train the data set and to predict the unknown values. The dominant elements of groundwater are as follows: Ca2, Mg2 for cation and Cl-, SO42, NO3− for anions. The regression value for the training data set was found to be 0.90596, and for the entire network, it was found to be 0.81729. The best performance was observed as 0.0022605 at epoch 223.

Green Manufacturing

The manufacturing sector has greater responsibility for conducting and operating its business. The primary objective of every unit is to maximize profits. The manufacturing sector is the key driver of energy consumption and if an automobile consumes high fuel or if the resources are under-utilized, it is definitely the fault of the manufacturer. If we seriously need a solution to these problems, we need to change the way we design, manufacture, and sell the products. The manufacturing sector must use energy and resources efficiently. ‘Green Manufacturing' or sustainable industrial activity is the need of the hour and the Government of India requires the manufacturing sector to play a bigger role in the country's economy. This paper focuses on the initiative taken by the industries to make the environment eco-friendly. The paper further will emphasize upon a case study of Hero MotoCop.