In this study, an overview is presented of agricultural policies on manure and minerals, relating to the Nitrate Directive to remedy excessive surface- and groundwater contamination from intensive agricultural practices. Six countries belonging to the European Union were studied: the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The policies and their legal incorporation were related to agricultural and environmental conditions in each country. In addition, an inventory was made of agricultural mineral poli- cies in the United States and Canada. Conditions for...

SCOPE, the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, was established by the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) in 1969 as an international, non to governmental, non-profit organisation with the mandate - advance knowledge of the influence of humans on their environment, as well as the effects of these environmental changes upon people, their health and their welfare with particular attention to those influences and effects which are either global or shared by several nations; - to serve as a non-governmental, interdisciplinary and international council of scien tists...

Increasing awareness of the irreversible and long-lasting impacts of deterioration and pollution of soils and sediments has had an important influence on environmental policies and research in the last decade. The complexity of the soil and sediment systems and its processes cannot be tackled properly unless scientists from different disciplines work together. With this in mind, a number of multidisciplinary soil research programmes have been started in various European countries. They involve different disciplinary approaches and they aim at different fields of application: agriculture, land...

Towards sustainable land use Dr. P. Folstar, Member of the TNO Board of Management Dr. M. Popp, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Research Centre Karlsruhe (FZK) Ten years ago, in 1985, TNO initiated the First Conference on Contaminated Soil in Utrecht. At that time, a rather complete inventory of suspected contaminated sites existed in The Netherlands. Time had come to consider further actions for investigations, evaluation and remediation. This concern has been spreading ever since to other European countries and throughout the world. In particular, German scientists and authorities...