Environmental and Sanitary

Engineering Course - Part 1

Natural Cycles
 Why Environmental Engineers need to know natural cycles?

- Human activities affect natural cycles. Environmental protection activities are oriented
to maintain the equilibrium of these cycles.
- Reduce Carbon dioxide emissions
- Avoid eutrophication (N and P cycles)
- Water quality conservation
- Water resource management

- Environmental Engineers use/manage natural bio-processes for (for example):

- Wastewater treatment
- Waste management (composting, anaerobic digestion, landfilling
- Bio-material or bio-energy production
 Systems and cycles

Isolated: no matter or energy enters or leaves

Closed: energy enters and leaves but material does not
Open: both energy and matter enter and leave
Picture from: http://www.uvm.edu/~cmehrten/courses/earthhist/Earth%20Closed%20System.pdf
 Systems and cycles

The Earth is a closed system:

energy from sunlight enters and “no” matter enters or leaves

The amount of “matter” inside the system is therefore constant.

Modification in the forms of “matter” can create “cycles”.

Students: Say some examples of a “cycle”:

 Earth as a closed system

Material flows between reservoirs or sinks along

pathways, or fluxes.
The water cycle
The water cycle
 The carbon cycle

This diagram of the fast carbon cycle shows the movement of carbon between land,
atmosphere, and oceans in billions of tons of carbon per year. Yellow numbers are natural fluxes,
red are human contributions in billions of tons of carbon per year. White numbers indicate
stored carbon.
The carbon cycle
picture from oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov
 The carbon cycle
The carbon cycle is the biogeochemical cycle by which carbon is exchanged among the
biosphere, pedosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere of the Earth.
It describes the movement of carbon as it is recycled and reused throughout the biosphere.

Carbon-based molecules are crucial for life on earth, because it is the main component of
biological compounds. Carbon is also a major component of many minerals. Carbon also
exists in various forms in the atmosphere.

The global carbon cycle is now usually divided into the following major reservoirs of carbon
interconnected by pathways of exchange:
- The atmosphere
- The terrestrial biosphere
- The oceans, including dissolved inorganic carbon and living and non-living marine biota
- The sediments, including fossil fuels, fresh water systems and non-living organic material,
such as soil carbon
- The Earth's interior, carbon from the Earth's mantle and crust.

These carbon stores interact with the other components through geological processesThe
carbon exchanges between reservoirs occur as the result of various chemical, physical,
geological, and biological processes.
 The carbon cycle
The terrestrial biosphere includes the organic carbon in all land-living organisms, both alive
and dead, as well as carbon stored in soils.

Most carbon in the terrestrial biosphere is organic carbon, while about a third of soil carbon
is stored in inorganic forms, such as calcium carbonate

Organic carbon is a major component of all organisms living on earth.

Autotrophs extract it from the air in the form of carbon dioxide, converting it into organic
carbon, while heterotrophs receive carbon by consuming other organisms.

Carbon leaves the terrestrial biosphere in several ways and on different time scales. The
combustion or respiration of organic carbon releases it rapidly into the atmosphere.
 The carbon cycle

Human activity since the industrial era has changed the balance in the
natural carbon cycle. Units are in gigatons.
 The carbon cycle
Since the industrial revolution, human activity has modified the carbon cycle by
changing its component's functions and directly adding carbon to the atmosphere.

The largest and most direct human influence on the carbon cycle is through direct
emissions from burning fossil fuels, which transfers carbon from the geosphere into the
atmosphere. Humans also influence the carbon cycle indirectly by changing the
terrestrial and oceanic biosphere.

Other human-caused changes to the environment change ecosystems' productivity and

thus their ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Air pollution, for example,
damages plants and soils, while many agricultural and land use practices lead to higher
erosion rates, washing carbon out of soils and decreasing plant productivity.

Humans also affect the oceanic carbon cycle. Current trends in climate change lead to
higher ocean temperatures, thus modifying ecosystems. Also, acid rain and polluted
runoff from agriculture and industry change the ocean's chemical composition. Such
changes can have dramatic effects on highly sensitive ecosystems such as coral reefs,
thus limiting the ocean's ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere on a regional
scale and reducing oceanic biodiversity globally.
The nitrogen cycle
The nitrogen cycle
The nitrogen cycle
 The nitrogen cycle
Nitrogen is essential for many processes and is crucial for any life on Earth. It is a
component in all amino acids, as incorporated into proteins, and is present in the bases
that make up nucleic acids, such as RNA and DNA. In plants, much of the nitrogen is
used in chlorophyll molecules, which are essential for photosynthesis and further
growth.

Nitrogen is present in the environment in a wide variety of chemical forms including

organic nitrogen, ammonium (NH4+), nitrite (NO2-), nitrate (NO3-), nitrous oxide (N2O),
nitric oxide (NO) or inorganic nitrogen gas (N2). Organic nitrogen may be in the form of a
living organism, humus or in the intermediate products of organic matter
decomposition. The processes of the nitrogen cycle transform nitrogen from one form
to another. Many of those processes are carried out by microbes, either in their effort to
harvest energy or to accumulate nitrogen in a form needed for their growth.
 The nitrogen cycle
The important parts of the nitrogen cycle are:

- Nitrogen fixation: most fixation is done by free-living or symbiotic bacteria. These

bacteria have the nitrogenase enzyme that combines gaseous nitrogen with hydrogen
to produce ammonia, which is then further converted by the bacteria to make their own
organic compounds.

- Assimilation: Plants take nitrogen from the soil, by absorption through their roots in
the form of either nitrate ions or ammonium ions. All nitrogen obtained by animals can
be traced back to the eating of plants at some stage of the food chain. While many
animals, fungi, and other heterotrophic organisms obtain nitrogen by ingestion of
amino acids, nucleotides and other small organic molecules, other heterotrophs
(including many bacteria) are able to utilize inorganic compounds, such as ammonium
as sole N sources.

- Ammonification: When a plant or animal dies, or an animal expels waste, the initial
form of nitrogen is organic. Bacteria, or fungi in some cases, convert the organic
nitrogen within the remains back into ammonium (NH4+), a process called
ammonification or mineralization.
 The nitrogen cycle
- Nitrification: The conversion of ammonia to nitrate is performed primarily by soil-
living bacteria and other nitrifying bacteria. In the primary stage of nitrification, the
oxidation of ammonium (NH4+) is performed by bacteria such as the Nitrosomonas
species, which converts ammonia to nitrites (NO2-). Other bacterial species, such as the
Nitrobacter, are responsible for the oxidation of the nitrites into nitrates (NO 3-). Due to
their very high solubility nitrates can enter groundwater. Elevated nitrate in
groundwater is a concern for drinking water use. Where groundwater recharges stream
flow, nitrate-enriched groundwater can contribute to eutrophication, a process that
leads to high algal, especially blue-green algal populations.

- Denitrification: Denitrification is the reduction of nitrates back into the largely inert
nitrogen gas (N2), completing the nitrogen cycle.
The phosphorus cycle
 The phosphorus cycle
Phosphorus is an important element for all forms of life. As phosphate (PO4), it makes
up an important part of the structural framework that holds DNA and RNA together.
Phosphates are also a critical component of ATP ? the cellular energy carrier ?

The phosphorus cycle differs from the other major biogeochemical cycles in that it
does not include a gas phase; although small amounts of phosphoric acid (H 3PO4) may
make their way into the atmosphere, contributing ? in some cases ? to acid rain.

The largest reservoir of phosphorus is in sedimentary rock. When it rains, phosphates

are removed from the rocks (via weathering) and are distributed throughout both soils
and water. Plants take up the phosphate ions from the soil. The phosphates then
moves from plants to animals when herbivores eat plants and carnivores eat plants or
herbivores. The phosphates absorbed by animal tissue through consumption
eventually returns to the soil through the excretion of urine and feces, as well as from
the final decomposition of plants and animals after death.
 The phosphorus cycle

The same process occurs within the aquatic ecosystem.

Phosphorus is not highly soluble, binding tightly to molecules in soil, therefore it
mostly reaches waters by traveling with runoff soil particles. Phosphates also enter
waterways through fertilizer runoff, sewage discharge, natural mineral deposits, and
wastes from other industrial processes.
These phosphates tend to settle on ocean floors and lake bottoms. As sediments are
stirred up, phosphates may reenter the phosphorus cycle, but they are more
commonly made available to aquatic organisms by being exposed through erosion.

In surface waters an excessive concentration of phosphorus is considered a pollutant.

Phosphate stimulates the growth of plankton and plants, favoring weedy species over
others. Excess growth of these plants tend to consume large amounts of dissolved
oxygen, potentially suffocating fish and other marine animals, while also blocking
available sunlight to bottom dwelling species. This is known as eutrophication.