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Waste management is still one of the leading global challenges in the 21st century. From the European Union’s point of view, the Waste Framework Directive obliges businesses and households to recycle at least 55% of their municipal waste by 2025 and to reach 65% in 2035. Hence there is a great need to seek new solutions for the reuse of various waste materials. One of the most widely used wastes is their utilization as fillers or reinforcements in the metal- or polymer-based composites. The reuse of wastes for the production of tribological materials gives not only environmental benefits related to the transformation of waste into raw materials but also may improve the mechanical and tribological properties of such materials. Moreover, the use of waste reduces the production costs resulting from the lower price of filler materials and longer service life of developed products. The purpose of the current review is, therefore, aimed at the evaluation of the reuse of agricultural, industrial and postconsumer wastes as reinforcements in the composites used for tribological applications. The tribological performance (wear rate, coefficient of friction) of both monolithic and hybrid composites reinforced with waste materials was a particular subject of interest in this review.

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Many organisations consider environmentally friendly activities, including the reduction of their carbon footprint, to be a significant aspect of their operation. In this study, a mathematical model was used to calculate the carbon footprint of food products at different stages of internal transport, using data on internal transport energy consumption. It was shown that for most products, the highest carbon footprint was related to the raw material transport stage from the loading/unloading point to the workstations on the production line. Broccoli showed the highest carbon footprint for internal transport per tonne of raw material. The study proposes methods of reducing the internal transport-related carbon footprint, which involves reorganising the distribution of goods in the warehouse and using nutritionally valuable vegetable waste in the production of food products.

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In this study, a comprehensive research on the toxicity of rhamnolipids and their influence on the toxicity of water extracts obtained from creosotecontaminated soil is performed. The obtained extracts contain organic compounds from the studied soil, which are eluted by pure water as well as solutions of rhamnolipids at different concentrations (ranging from 150 to 1500 mg L À1 where 150 mg L À1 corresponds with 1Â critical micelle concentration (CMC). GC-MS analyses allow for classification of the organic compounds into groups representing (i) 2-and 3-ring polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), (ii) 4-and 5-ring PAHs, (iii) monoaromatic phenols, (iv) N-heterocyclic compounds, and (v) other organic compounds. The addition of rhamnolipids reduces the elution of polar compounds and promote the elution of hydrophobic compounds from soil (the elution of polycyclic hydrocarbons increases with increasing concentration of rhamnolipids). Moreover, HPLC-MS analyses indicates a drop of the concentration of rhamnolipids compared to the initial concentration, suggesting a sorption of rhamnolipids on the soil matrix. Experiments regarding the toxicity toward activated sludge microorganisms (dehydrogenase activity assay), phytotoxicity (Phytotestkits), mutagenicity (Ames test), and cytotoxicity (MTT test) of extracts with and without rhamnolipids are also conducted. It is found that rhamnolipids increased the toxicity of the extracts toward microorganisms of activated sludge, phytotoxicity, cytotoxicity as well as mutagenicity toward Salmonella typhimurium TA 1537. The increasing toxicity in the presence of rhamnolipids can both be associated with increased bioavailability of toxic organic compounds as well as the toxicity of rhamnolipids.Ã Values of mutagenic activity for samples with statistically significant increase in the amount of induced revertants (p < 0.05) regarding to the negative control (number of spontaneous revertants) are in bold.

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