Land application of municipal biosolids: managing the fate and transport of contaminants of emerging concern
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Municipal biosolids provide organic matter to soil, and nutrients essential for crop growth. Some contaminants of standing and emerging concern such as pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs), hormones, brominated flame retardants, and highly persistent perfluoroalkyl acids are not fully removed in the waste treatment process; and thus, they are often found in resultant biosolids applied to land. This paper provides an overview of selected research led by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada on monitoring and predicting the fate and transport of these noted contaminants in field soil-hydrological environments following land applications of dewatered and liquid municipal biosolids. Different land application practices were examined in the context of their potential to reduce environmental exposure. Field studies of liquid/slurry municipal biosolids demonstrated that in macroporous soils contaminants of all types can rapidly reach shallow groundwater and tile drainage systems. Nevertheless, loads of contaminants in subsurface (tile) drainage can be significantly reduced if an aeration-based pre-tillage is employed. For dewatered municipal biosolids, directly injecting biosolids into subsoil had an indifferent effect upon water contamination, when compared with traditional surface application methods. For very high single applications of dewatered municipal biosolids to land, compounds such as the antifungal miconazole, the PBDE congener BDE 209, and perfluorooctanoic acids, for example, can persist in biosolid aggregates. Yet, for modestly macroporous soils, most of these compounds will not enter critical subsurface water receptors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".