Journal of Pollution

COVID-19 pandemic has allowed us to see the very new prospects of health issues. The biomedical waste management is such an important issue that has evolved rapidly in the COVID-19 pandemic. The issue ranges from identifying the biomedical waste to the management. The laws were formulated, policy has been changed but the ground-level changes are yet to be seen. The current manuscript focuses on the various important loopholes in the current policy in India and suggestions to improve the same.

Heavy metal pollution is considered one of the most common and harmful pollution known to cause severity in the case of living beings residing. The present study was conducted to determine the heavy metal tolerance of bacteria isolated from the Rajpardi lignite mine, Gujarat, India, and characterize them. Eight bacteria were isolated and cultured in Nutrient Agar Medium. Morphological and biochemical characterization tests revealed the presence of 3 Enterobacter species, 2 Klebsiella species, 2 Bacillus species and 1 Streptobacillus species. Following this, the heavy metal tolerance assay was performed against five different metal salts – Hg, Ni, Al, Pb and Cu by dissolving the metal salts in various broth culture tubes and determining the growth turbidity in UV-Vis Spectrophotometer at an absorbance of 600 nm. All the isolates displayed the highest tolerance against the heavy metal, aluminium, with maximum tolerance shown by bacterial isolates marked LCB3 and LCB9. Thus, the Rajpardi lignite mine can be considered a new source with potential candidates for bioremediation of an environment contaminated with aluminium.