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Food pollution can cause a variety of negative effects on human health, especially reproductive toxicity. Common food contaminants include biological contaminants, chemical contaminants, and physical contaminants, among which endocrine disruptors, pesticides, and heavy metals have the greatest reproductive toxicity in chemical contaminants. Humans mainly solve food pollution through three aspects: decreasing the pollution of food raw materials, lowering the pollution in food processing, and reducing the harm to the human body after food pollutants enter the human body. With more and more research on probiotics, not only beneficial effects, but also the ability to reduce the toxicity of food contaminants is found. Thus, microbial treatment has been proved to be a more effective way to deal with food pollution. Recent research shows that several strains of Lactiplantibacillus plantarum can adsorb or degrade some chemical pollutants and relieve inflammation and oxidative stress caused by them. This review summarized the research to explore the possible role of Lactiplantibacillus plantarum in protecting human reproductive ability and maintaining food safety., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Residues disposal from the dismantling of waste electrical and electronic equipment are challenging because of the large waste volumes, degradation-resistance, low density and high heavy metal content. Incineration is advantageous for treating these residues but high heavy metal contents may exist in incinerator input and output streams. We have developed and studied a specialized heavy metal reduction process, which includes sieving and washing for treating residues before incineration. The preferable screen aperture for sieving was found to be 2.36mm (8 meshes) in this study; using this screen aperture resulted in the removal of approximately 47.2% Cu, 65.9% Zn, 26.5% Pb, 55.4% Ni and 58.8% Cd from the residues. Subsequent washing further reduces the heavy metal content in the residues larger than 2.36mm, with preferable conditions being 400rpm rotation speed, 5min washing duration and liquid-to-solid ratio of 25:1. The highest cumulative removal efficiencies of Cu, Zn, Pb, Ni and Cd after sieving and washing reached 81.1%, 61.4%, 75.8%, 97.2% and 72.7%, respectively. The combined sieving and washing process is environmentally friendly, can be used for the removal of heavy metals from the residues and has benefits in terms of heavy metal recycling., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The large amount of residues generated from dismantling waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) results in a considerable environmental burden. We used material flow analysis to investigate heavy metal behavior in an incineration plant in China used exclusively to incinerate residues from WEEE dismantling. The heavy metals tested were enriched in the bottom and fly ashes after incineration. However, the contents of heavy metals in the bottom ash, fly ash and exhaust gas do not have a significant correlation with that of the input waste. The evaporation and recondensation behavior of heavy metals caused their contents to differ with air pollution control equipment because of the temperature difference during gas venting. Among the heavy metals tested, Cd had the strongest tendency to transfer during incineration (TCd=69.5%) because it had the lowest melting point, followed by Cu, Ni, Pb and Zn. The exchangeable and residual fractions of heavy metals increased substantially in the incineration products compared with that of the input residues. Although the mass of residues from WEEE dismantling can be reduced by 70% by incineration, the safe disposal of the metal-enriched bottom and fly ashes is still required., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)