CH2M Hill

Coal gangue, one of the largest solid waste streams produced by coal mining, is commonly viewed as an environmental burden or an inexpensive filler material. A new review suggests that this mineral rich waste could play a much more active role in wastewater treatment.

Solar-driven desalination is a promising way to produce freshwater sustainably using sunlight. However, existing systems struggle when desalinating oily seawater because oil fouls their specialized membranes.

CISA is currently observing a significant increase in cyber threat actors targeting programmable logic controllers (PLCs) in the Water and Wastewater Systems (WWS) Sector. CISA urges critical infrastructure owners, operators, and integrators to remove publicly exposed PLCs and other operational technology (OT) from the internet as soon as possible.

What is the state of global lake water quality? A global assessment covering 16,409 lakes across 145 countries reveals that only 63.3% of lakes worldwide meet good water quality standards. More concerningly, among the approximately 2 billion people living within the service areas of freshwater lakes, more than half are exposed to lakes with poor water quality, indicating potential health risks associated with freshwater security.

Industrial wastewater from electronics manufacturing, metal processing and other sectors often contains two difficult pollutants at once: high levels of salt and toxic heavy metals. Current treatment methods typically address those problems separately, creating costly, complex systems that can produce hazardous brines or metal-laden sludge. Now a group of researchers at Rice University and Vanderbilt University have created an electrochemical platform that could do both jobs at once.

Every summer, algal blooms turn rivers and lakes green. Although they are widely known as a major form of water pollution that makes the water murky, a KAIST research team has now shown for the first time that algal bloom conditions can make discarded plastics, such as plastic bags, more prone to breaking apart, potentially accelerating the formation of microplastics. The study points to a new direction for the era of climate change: water pollution and plastic pollution need to be managed together, rather than as separate problems.