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Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide worldwide. It is a broad spectrum herbicide and its agricultural uses increased considerably after the development of glyphosate-resistant genetically modified (GM) varieties. Since glyphosate was introduced in 1974, all regulatory assessments have established that glyphosate has low hazard potential to mammals, however, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) concluded in March 2015 that it is probably carcinogenic. The IARC conclusion was not confirmed by the EU assessment or the recent joint WHO/FAO evaluation, both using additional evidence. Glyphosate is not the first topic of disagreement between IARC and regulatory evaluations, but has received greater attention. This review presents the scientific basis of the glyphosate health assessment conducted within the European Union (EU) renewal process, and explains the differences in the carcinogenicity assessment with IARC. Use of different data sets, particularly on long-term toxicity/carcinogenicity in rodents, could partially explain the divergent views; but methodological differences in the evaluation of the available evidence have been identified. The EU assessment did not identify a carcinogenicity hazard, revised the toxicological profile proposing new toxicological reference values, and conducted a risk assessment for some representatives uses. Two complementary exposure assessments, human-biomonitoring and food-residues-monitoring, suggests that actual exposure levels are below these reference values and do not represent a public concern. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00204-017-1962-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Tehran is the country’s most densely populated district which is located on the southern part of Alborz Mountains. Many sensitive infrastructures such as dams, roads, power lines and housing complexes are located within the area. In this paper the potential of landslide hazard for North Tehran is evaluated and a hazard zonation map based on ARC-GIS method is prepared. Several parameters such as lithology, slope angle, slope direction, distance from faults and seismicity (earthquake deduced acceleration) are considered as main factors. The quality parameters of the defined effecting factors are quantified by the above named software where the data layers are divided into smaller classes. In the next stage, specific weights are assigned to each class and the hazard potential values are determined. Finally they are presented as a landslide hazard zonation map of the area. It was found that slope angle of 16–35°, slope direction from 40° to 140°, lithology of tuffacious rocks, distance of fewer 2 km from fault and seismicity of over 0.5 g has great effect on the distribution of landslide in the area.

The mercury-bearing lamps, towards the end-of-life, pose significant hazard potential due to the likely release of mercury. Though, these fluorescent lamps (FLs) release relatively less quantity of mercury when disposed as compared to other mercury-based products, they are still a concern due to the large and further growing number of FLs in service, particularly, in the domestic sector and their fragile nature.

The concept of hazard in the current interpretation of the European and national regulations is directed to local and short-term effects and its assessment is based on the distribution in space of the concentration of contaminants in abiotic and biotic compartments. We expand this concept and address its limitations by describing potential hazard with full space–time dimension, i.e., from short term to long term, and from local to regional. This most straightforward technique to quantify hazard is biogeochemical and based on the scale-specific processes of metals mobility. The short-term hazard of a contaminated area (and its future hazards in different environmental scenarios) depends on the stocks of metals, on the fluxes of outgoing elements, and on the retention time of the elements (ratio between stock and sum of fluxes). Different hazard situations can result from the relative importance of the intensity of the carrier flux and the mobilization of metals by the carrier flux. The analyses of long-term hazard can relocate a contaminated site from one hazard situation to another because of changes in the intensity of the carrier flux or/and of the mobility of metals. The mineralogical aspects controlling the stocks of metals in contaminated areas and the outgoing fluxes of metals are discussed analytically by type of source and type of flux and research directions are identified. Finally, the specific example of hazard evaluation for Romanian tailing dams is presented based on the approach introduced here.

Landslides continue to be a major natural disaster causing loss of life, extensive human suffering and economic losses, despite advances in understanding of mechanisms, monitoring and mitigation technologies related to landslides. Sharing the globally accumulated expertise and implementing this knowledge effectively in different local contexts is the major challenge now facing landslide loss reduction efforts. Landslides characteristics differ according to climatic, geological and geographical conditions. They are also affected by different triggering mechanisms depending on the livelihood practices, infrastructure development and population density in each locality. Landslide risk reduction practices and institutional arrangements have evolved in different countries in response to varied landslide experiences brought about by these different geo-physical characteristics and drivers. An objective analysis of the practices adopted worldwide would provide invaluable guidance to develop pragmatic landslide risk reduction strategies and responsible institutions, especially in the developing countries where the impacts are greatest and the vulnerabilities are the highest, especially with increasing hazard potential due to climate change. This chapter describes national programs and methodologies adopted in landslide risk reduction in various countries as a contribution in this direction

The majority of environmentally relevant substances can be quantitatively analyzed in various matrices — provided that the samples may be sent to an analytical laboratory. The analysis there involves an extraction and a clean-up step prior to the -mostly chromatographic — separation and analysis. Thus this procedure is quite time-consuming. Moreover, these laboratory based techniques are very costly if continuous monitoring is necessary or if hundreds of soil samples have to be analysed to assess the hazard potential of a particular site. For these screening and monitoring applications optical methods are much more suitable.

Over the years, approaches to the treatment of neglected deposits of toxic waste have changed considerably. Generally speaking, from the time the systematic treatment of such sites began in the early 1980’s (in Germany, “the toxic waste era” had begun in 1983 with the discovery of dioxin in the Georgswerder district of Hamburg) until 1992, the detection of a specific hazard potential provided the basis for any decision on cleaning up the pollution. The main problem was seen as the concentration of pollutant in the total soil sample. Thus when dealing with residual toxic pollution, most attention was given to the soil, with less emphasis being placed on groundwater. The numerous lists developed to help make decisions on cleaning sites up are proof of this basic philosophy. Clean-up aims were addressed by the question “how clean is clean?”. Treatment in the sense of decontamination came to the fore, i.e., clean-ups were normally based on the principle of precaution. That meant a measure that could be applied in the establishment of new sites or in the use of materials and products in the environment in order to avoid lasting, detrimental changes to environmental media. There was no call for problem solutions in the form of protective measures.