Awareness Seminar on Environmental Waste at the Faculty of Science

The Community Service and Environmental Development Sector at the Faculty of Science in cooperation with the Institute of Environmental Studies and Research organized a symposium entitled "Hazardous materials and wastes and their impact on the environment".

The seminar discussed the beginning and history of the discovery and recording of the most dangerous environmental materials and waste that affect the human and animal environment. Prof. Dr. Taha Abdel Azim, the undersecretary of the Institute of the Environment and the seminar lecturer, explained that the discovery of classifications of hazardous substances is due to the incident of "Love Canal" in 1892. It happened when William Tull wanted to build an industrial city based on hydropower generation by exploiting the water level difference between two points up and down the Niagara River by digging a channel named after him. After digging one mile 15 feet wide and 10 feet deep, the world was depressed and the drilling stopped in this hole or canal remained until the province where the canal was located required a site to bury the chemical waste. Over the years, this pit has received 22,000 tons of chemical waste.

The land was sold and includes a waste dump. A residential community with a school was established and the years passed until the population discovered the ill health of schoolchildren. Some women were also subjected to early abortion. With the worsening of the problems caused by the site was vacated until President Jimmy Carter issued a decision to consider the region a "disaster zone" was adopted compensation law and the site from the sites of heavy spending and the company that buried its chemical waste spending nearly 150 million dollars until 1985.

Dr. Taha stressed that since the incident, the hazardous chemicals have been classified as lethal, pathogenic, cancer causing, mutagenic, mutagenic, corrosive, inflammatory, explosive and reactive. He explained that the causes of cancer are hexagon chromium salts and thalidomide in the 1960s, it was used as an anti-emetic in pregnant women until it turned out that he was having children with a bony arm.

Adding that the list of hazardous materials included substances that affect the environmental systems. Among these materials was DDT, which is used in pesticides, and also polychlorinated biphenyls, which are used as plastic cities, and their accumulation in the food chain has been shown to have resulted in the extinction of some species of birds from birds, a direct result of the non-biodegradability of these substances.

Bacterial microorganisms can also convert mercury contamination into a dimethyl mercury compound, whose accumulation in the food chain causes the outbreak of Minamata disease in Japan in the 1950s.