Ronald E Hester is at the University of York, UK Roy M Harrison OBE is at the University of Birmingham, UK

The series has been edited by Professors Hester and Harrison since it began in 1994.

Professor Roy Harrison OBE is listed by ISI Thomson Scientific (on ISI Web of Knowledge) as a Highly Cited Researcher in the Environmental Science/Ecology category. He has an h-index of 54 (i.e. 54 of his papers have received 54 or more citations in the literature). In 2004 he was appointed OBE for services to environmental science in the New Year Honours List. He was profiled by the Journal of Environmental Monitoring (Vol 5, pp 39N-41N, 2003). Professor Harrison’s research interests lie in the field of environment and human health. His main specialism is in air pollution, from emissions through atmospheric chemical and physical transformations to exposure and effects on human health. Much of this work is designed to inform the development of policy.

Now an emeritus professor, Professor Ron Hester's current activities in chemistry are mainly as an editor and as an external examiner and assessor. He also retains appointments as external examiner and assessor / adviser on courses, individual promotions, and departmental / subject area evaluations both in the UK and abroad.

Environmental Forensics

By R. E. Hester, R. M. Harrison

The Royal Society of Chemistry

Copyright © 2008 Royal Society of Chemistry
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85404-957-8

Contents

Environmental Forensics and the Importance of Source Identification Stephen M. Mudge,
Microbial Techniques for Environmental Forensics Andrew S. Ball, Jules N. Pretty and Rakhi Mahmud,
Spatial Considerations of Stable Isotope Analyses in Environmental Forensics James R. Ehleringer, Thure E. Cerling, Jason B. West, David W. Podlesak, Lesley A. Chesson and Gabriel J. Bowen,
Diagnostic Compounds for Fingerprinting Petroleum in the Environment Scott A. Stout and Zhendi Wang,
Perchlorate – Is Nature the Main Manufacturer? Ioana G. Petrisor and James T. Wells,
Tracking Chlorinated Solvents in the Environment Ioana G. Petrisor and James T. Wells,
Groundwater Pollution: The Emerging Role of Environmental Forensics Stanley Feenstra and Michael O. Rivett,
Subject Index, 173,

CHAPTER 1

Environmental Forensics and the Importance of Source Identification

STEPHEN M. MUDGE

1 Introduction

The scientific community has been taking samples and identifying the source of the materials in those samples for many years – this is the basis of all environmental forensics, the identification and source apportionment of compounds in environmental samples. What is different, however, is that with source apportionments comes blame, and blame these days means costs.

Environmental forensics could be summarized as an investigation of what is in the environment, where it has come from and using that data to prosecute those who have contravened particular laws. There are other aspects to environmental forensics which include data mining and prediction to understand better what is going on, helping industries at the design stage to ensure they comply with relevant legislation and simply reconstructing environmental histories – who did what, when and where?

2 The Legislative Framework for Environmental Forensics

One of the key aspects of environmental forensics is the bringing together of data in order to have a successful prosecution. There are many debates as to what prosecutions are for (deterrent, punishment, revenge, etc.), but they are beyond the scope of this chapter; however, there is a considerable framework in law to enable either the State or individuals to seek redress with regard to contamination or injury due to damage to the environment.

2.1.1 National Legislation

2.1.2 UK. Most of the recent legislation protecting the environment in the UK has been derived from European Directives, which are discussed later. However, prior to 1995, there were several key pieces of legislation that have formed the basis of many prosecutions by the State through the Environment Agency or the National Rivers Authority, its precursor. The Environment Act 1995 brought the United Kingdom Environment Agency and Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) into being and outlined the requirements of a range of bodies with regard to contaminated land and abandoned mines to enhance some aspects of pollution control.

The majority of actions against environmental crimes in the UK appear to be under this Act or the Water Resources Act 1991. In this Act, there are several sections concerned with management of water resources, but a key section with regard to environmental forensics is Section 85, Offences of Polluting Controlled Waters. The subsections of this Act are the most frequently cited offences in environmental cases (N. Evans, personal communication).

(1) A person contravenes this section if he causes or knowingly permits any poisonous, noxious or polluting matter or any solid waste matter to enter any controlled waters.

(2) A person contravenes this section if he causes or knowingly permits any matter, other than trade effluent or sewage effluent, to enter controlled waters by being discharged from a drain or sewer in contravention of a prohibition imposed under section 86 below.

(3) A person contravenes this section if he causes or knowingly permits any trade effluent or sewage effluent to be discharged –

(a) into any controlled waters; or

(b) from land in England and Wales, through a pipe, into the sea outside the seaward limits of controlled waters.

(4) A person contravenes this section if he causes or knowingly permits any trade effluent or sewage effluent to be discharged, in contravention of any prohibition imposed under section 86 below, from a building or from any fixed plant –

(a) on to or into any land; or

(b) into any waters of a lake or pond which are not inland freshwaters.

(5) A person contravenes this section if he causes or knowingly permits any matter whatever to enter any inland freshwaters so as to tend (either directly or in combination with other matter which he or another person causes or permits to enter those waters) to impede the proper flow of the waters in a manner leading or likely to lead, to a substantial aggravation of –

(a) pollution due to other causes; or

(b) the consequences of such pollution.

(6) Subject to the following provisions of this Chapter, a person who contravenes this section or the conditions of any consent given under this Chapter for the purposes of this section shall be guilty of an offence and liable –

(a) on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding three months or to a fine not exceeding £20 000 or to both;

(b) on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or to a fine or to both.

Section 85(1) of the Water Resources Act 1991 provides the over-arching legislative power to bring a criminal prosecution against individuals or companies if they allow 'poisonous, noxious or polluting matter' to enter controlled waters. To bring such a prosecution, however, it would be necessary to demonstrate 'beyond all reasonable doubt' that a discharge had been made by a person or company to controlled waters. Notwithstanding the considerable amount of case law that has developed regarding the meaning of individual words in this section of the Act, the science required to bring a successful case must unambiguously identify the source of the contamination and also make estimates of the amount discharged to demonstrate that it exceeded an authorization to discharge.

There are other UK Acts that are used in environmental prosecutions, including the Water Industry Act 1991. Much of this Act is to do with the supply of water and provision of sewerage services, although Section 111 sets out the restrictions on the use of public sewers and specifically forbids the discharge to public sewers of items that may lead to failure of the treatment processes or lead to unauthorized discharges from the sewage treatment works.

(1) Subject to the provisions of Chapter III of this Part, no person shall throw, empty or turn or suffer or permit to be thrown or emptied or to pass, into any public sewer or into any drain or sewer communicating with a public sewer –

(a) any matter likely to injure the sewer or drain, to interfere with the free flow of its contents or to affect prejudicially the treatment and disposal of its contents; or

(b) any such chemical refuse or waste steam or any such liquid of a temperature higher than one hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit, as by virtue of subsection (2) below is a prohibited substance; or

(c) any petroleum spirit or...

The series has been edited by Professors Hester and Harrison since it began in 1994.

Professor Roy Harrison OBE is listed by ISI Thomson Scientific (on ISI Web of Knowledge) as a Highly Cited Researcher in the Environmental Science/Ecology category. He has an h-index of 54 (i.e. 54 of his papers have received 54 or more citations in the literature). In 2004 he was appointed OBE for services to environmental science in the New Year Honours List. He was profiled by the Journal of Environmental Monitoring (Vol 5, pp 39N-41N, 2003). Professor Harrison’s research interests lie in the field of environment and human health. His main specialism is in air pollution, from emissions through atmospheric chemical and physical transformations to exposure and effects on human health. Much of this work is designed to inform the development of policy.

Now an emeritus professor, Professor Ron Hester's current activities in chemistry are mainly as an editor and as an external examiner and assessor. He also retains appointments as external examiner and assessor / adviser on courses, individual promotions, and departmental / subject area evaluations both in the UK and abroad.

Sustainability and Environmental Impact of Renewable Energy Sources

By R. E. Hester, R. M. Harrison

The Royal Society of Chemistry

Copyright © 2003 The Royal Society of Chemistry
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85404-290-6

Contents

The Future of Today's Energy Sources Bernard J. Bulkin, 1,
Sustainable Energy: Choices, Problems and Opportunities David Elliott, 19,
Renewable Energy: Technology Considerations and Electricity Integration David Infield and Paul Rowley, 49,
Landfill Gas and Related Energy Sources: Anaerobic Digesters; Biomass Energy Systems Adrian Loening, 69,
Emissions Trading Schemes: Are They a 'Licence to Pollute'? Fiona Mullins, 89,
UK Government Policy on Renewable Energy Brian Wilson, 105,
Renewables, Sustainability and Precaution: Beyond Environmental Cost–Benefit and Risk Analysis Andrew Stirling, 113,
Subject Index, 135,

CHAPTER 1

The Future of Today's Energy Sources

BERNARD J. BULKIN

1 The 1973 Energy Crisis

Crises inspire change. In 1973, the oil embargo associated with the Yom Kippur war led many people to look at the technologies around energy and predict that radical change would occur. There were forecasts, taken very seriously, that by 2000 oil would be nearly gone. The internal combustion engine was seen as having reached the limit of its ability to develop. Environmental concerns over air pollution were also seen as driving the rapid growth of nuclear power, and there was considerable effort being expended on commercialization of solar energy. Yet even at that time, some futurists warned that 'energy crises' had occurred before, and rarely had the predicted outcomes. Examples were the energy crisis associated with the lack of sites for new water wheels, and those created in many places by lack of wood through deforestation.

The main outcome of the 1973 'energy crisis' was efficiency. In the United States, as shown in Figure 1, the fuel economy of the car fleet doubled between 1973 and 1980. Appliances also became much more efficient: the average new refrigerator in the United States by the late 1990s was nearly 300% more efficient than in 1973 (Figure 2). These changes, which took place relatively rapidly, have shown great staying power.

The other big outcome was a shift away from oil as a fuel, particularly for power generation. In 10 years, oil went from being 17% of US power generation to about 2.5%. The shift was technically possible (coal and nuclear were the big winners, but once this driving force was removed, nuclear growth slowed) and economically desirable.

However, the core technologies of how we generate and consume energy, and the fuels we use, did not change radically. Perhaps the biggest change on the generation side, the growth of combined cycle gas turbines, was less a technological breakthrough than the conscientious application of basic principles of thermodynamics, made possible by a combination of materials science and information technology. As far as use goes, cars are still powered by internal combustion engines (though with increased use of another old technology, diesel engines, in Europe), not by batteries or Stirling engines. Refrigerators look and function in much the same way today as they did 25 years ago.

There are lessons to learn from a look back of a quarter century. We see that radical change is possible. Doubling fuel economy of cars, tripling the efficiency of some major appliances, major changes in fuels (the UK went from 87% of its primary energy coming from coal in 1950 to 18% in 2001) do happen, and they are not fluctuations, but have long lasting effects. However, we also learn that the system has great resilience. There is a huge entrenched infrastructure which has great efficiency associated with it, and it takes major systemic shock (such as occurred in 1973) to upset it.

There are also important lessons on supply. Predicting the future supply of any fossil fuel is probably impossible. Supply over the timescales we can consider relate to margin — price minus cost — rather than to fundamentals of the geology of the planet. It is also difficult to predict either price or cost with any degree of accuracy, so the uncertainty in the difference is very great. In subsequent sections this will be illustrated with reference to developing an understanding of the current reserves of the major fuels used today, and views about the future supplies of these fuels.

2 How Fossil Fuels Have Affected Our Lives

Until the 19th century, human progress was limited by the amount of work that people could do in a day to feed themselves and their families. The economy was largely rural as a result. Beginning in the 19th century, people began to develop coal, oil and other stored energy sources to supplement solar energy. The results of plant and animal growth through solar energy, over huge areas and geologic time periods, coupled with violent geological upheaval, became available for human exploitation. Knowledge was required to develop machines capable of coupling these power inputs to human needs, and to be sure the great scientific work of the pioneers of thermodynamics and its application were critical. But what really changed the nature of how people lived on this planet was the several orders of magnitude increase of the energy sources that were available. There was, and continues to be, excess energy available to obtain more fossil fuels, to do research on how to exploit these fuels more efficiently, and to use them to drive change in cultures. Progress from that time until now has been 'like a flash explosion compared to the steady fires of the evolutionary record for previous millions of years'.

One of the most important results of industrialization based on these energy sources is abundant food. Odum has pointed out that it is an illusion, and a conceit of industrial society, that we are better at using the sun to grow food than our predecessors. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, we no longer eat food made completely from solar energy: we now eat potatoes made partly of oil! The same is true in the growth of animals for both meat and dairy products. This is not just the case on the farm, but also in the factories where farm machinery is made, fertilizer is manufactured, and in the universities where farming research is done on productivity. In effect, as Odum makes quantitatively clear, our society is developed around a 'fossil fuel subsidy', somewhat supplemented by a nuclear energy subsidy. In this paper, one of the questions we are looking at is: how long can this continue?

3 Energy Use in the World Today: Fuels and How They Are Used

Figure 3 shows a view of the energy use in the World. It is conveniently divided into four major categories: transport, power generation, industry/domestic/agriculture, and the small amount used to convert one fuel to another (e.g. energy cost of refining of petroleum into gasoline and diesel fuel). The figure shows not only the quantities for each category of energy use, but also the fuel mix of the category.

As is well known, transport is completely dominated by oil. All other fuels combined are not sufficient to show up on a graph this size. Clearly the oil business is very dependent on demand from the transport sector, and the transport sector is very vulnerable to any disruption of supply of oil, as the entire infrastructure is built around a single fuel source.

This is not the case for the other major sectors. Power generation is very...

Chemicals in the Environment

Assessing and Managing Risk

By R.E. Hester, R.M. Harrison

The Royal Society of Chemistry

Copyright © 2006 The Royal Society of Chemistry
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85404-206-7

Contents

The Current Regulation of Environmental Chemicals John Garrod, 1,
Chemicals Risk Assessment and Management Elliot G. Finer, 21,
Future Perspectives in Risk Assessment of Chemicals Peter Floyd, 45,
Assessing Risks to Human Health Paul T.C. Harrison and Philip Holmes, 65,
Environmental Risk Assessment Lorraine Maltby, 84,
Risk Assessment of Metals in the Environment Peter G.C. Campbell, Peter M. Chapman and Beverley A. Hale, 102,
Partitioning, Persistence and Long-Range Transport of Chemicals in the Environment Donald Mackay Eva Webster and Todd, 132,
Subject Index, 154,

CHAPTER 1

The Current Regulation of Environmental Chemicals

JOHN GARROD

Introduction

Man-made chemicals and naturally occurring chemicals used in industrial processes or in consumer products may enter the environment at any or all stages of their life cycle from the stage of production/manufacture through formulation and use and including disposal of a used product. The potential for harm to be caused to the environment or to human health via the environment will be dependent on the basic physico-chemical and toxic properties of the chemical, the amount that enters the environment and its distribution between different environmental compartments. The physical properties of a chemical will also determine whether the route of entry is likely to be via air, water or to the terrestrial environment.

The scope of this chapter is largely restricted to industrial chemicals that are not subject to a positive approval system, for example, pesticides, biocides and veterinary medicines, but these may be briefly touched on where appropriate. It will also be restricted to considering the regulation of impacts of chemicals on the environment and on human health via the environment. A consideration of the protection of humans in the work place is also not included.

It is proposed to consider both legal and other frameworks that have been put in place to prevent harm to the environment or to human health via the environment that arises out of the production, use or disposal of hazardous chemicals. Much legislation has been introduced to prevent damage occurring to the environment and human health from chemicals but other approaches including voluntary approaches from government and industry have been adopted.

2 Protection of the Water Environment

Many chemical production facilities have been located historically adjacent to rivers and estuaries frequently to allow ready extraction of water and raw materials (e.g. salt) for industrial processes and for the discharge of waste effluent to the receiving water posing a potential risk to the aquatic environment. The chemical industry has been very successful and thousands of products used in a multitude of commercial and consumer products have been developed and marketed around the world. The UK has become a major player in the international chemical industry. In the past, it was often the case that many chemical production facilities discharged poorly or even untreated waste streams to fresh or marine water bodies resulting in extensive damage to the water quality and resulting in harm to aquatic organisms. In some cases, effluents are discharged directly into the sewage system and pass through a sewage treatment works (STW) before entry into a river or the marine environment. This had the potential to cause harm to the treatment plant itself or for inadequate degradation of the chemical before entering into the receiving water body.

21 Control of Chemical Discharges to the Environment

The regulation or control of dangerous chemicals or substances to the environment, particularly to water, from industrial plants or STW has been implemented by various pieces of legislation derived from the Dangerous Substances Directive (76/464/EEC) and Daughter Directives, The Environmental Protection Act (EPA)1990 and the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) Directive (96/61/EEC). More recently, the Water Framework Directive (WFD) has been introduced to regulate the quality of all water resources in the European Union (EU).

Directive (76/464/EEC) was implemented to control discharges of dangerous substances to inland surface waters, territorial waters, inland coastal waters and ground water. Chemicals identified as the most hazardous to the aquatic environment are in list 1 of the Directive and the legislation requires that these chemicals be completely eliminated from discharges to water. The chemicals in this list are toxic and persist in the environment and accumulate in biological systems causing harm to aquatic life. Dangerous substances in list 2 were thought to be less hazardous than those in list 1. Chemicals in list 2 have an Environmental Quality Standard (EQS) set according to a standard methodology. EQSs represent a concentration limit that must not be exceeded in any controlled water in the UK and the dangerous substance is not believed to be harmful to the aquatic environment at concentrations below this limit.

Where there are uncertainties arising from lack of information, for instance on salt water organisms, larger safety factors are used for the derivation of the EQS. The standards apply to the receiving water and not to the discharge itself. These are statutory standards and the environment agencies (i.e. the Environment Agency, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency and Environment and Heritage Service, Northern Ireland) have a legal obligation to ensure that they are met. Where special areas for conservation are concerned, the relevant enforcing agency should examine whether an EQS is sufficient to protect the species at the site. The adequacy of EQSs for substances in list 2 has been addressed by Grimwood and Dixon (1997).

Regulatory monitoring for EQS compliance will be carried out at sites from industrial plants and STW where there is the possibility that the discharge effluent will contain dangerous substances. All major rivers will also have background monitoring sites just upstream of their tidal limits, the so-called National Network monitoring sites in the UK.

Discharges to controlled waters from STWs and industrial sites will also be monitored for compliance with their consents to discharge dangerous substances. These consents set limits for individual substance concentrations to ensure that the concentrations in the watercourse downstream do not exceed the EQS.

In 1980 the protection of groundwater was taken out of directive 76/464/EEC and regulated under the separate Council Directive 80/68/EEC on the protection of groundwater against pollution caused by certain dangerous substances.

Broader thinking to address European water policy was addressed in 1988 at the Frankfurt Ministerial seminar on water which resulted in a series of directives after the 1976 Dangerous Substances Directive to fill gaps identified in the existing regulations. This resulted in the introduction of the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive, the Nitrates Directive in 1991, a Directive for IPPC in 1996 and a new Drinking Water Directive in 1998.

1.2 Water Framework Directive (WFD)

Pressure from the EU Council and the European Parliament to consider water in a more holistic way led to a new European Water Policy, which was...