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Declining public finances and ever increasing national and international competition force state-owned German universities to adapt to an increasingly competitive environment. In a first phase the universities have concentrated their efforts on the optimisation of budgeting processes and on the development of strategies and goals to come to a more efficient way of distributing scarce financial resources. This has been accompanied by a sharpening of their profiles, a process that is still in full flight in a majority of the universities. However, the more dynamic institutions are now entering a second stage of reforms and focusing their efforts on the professionalism of their decision makers as well as their internal management structures in order to become more competitive on an international scale. The greater autonomy from the formerly very rigid system of state control works like an accelerator in this process. In this article, I discuss the framework in which the adaptation of the internationally common system of a professional dean at school level could take place to help the achievement of the strategic goals of the school. The second part of this article analyses the dangers of an unaltered adaptation of this approach in the German system and the steps that should be taken to avoid friction and dysfunctional effects.

Urban runoff contains a range of organic micropollutants which, if not removed during wastewater treatment, pose a risk to aquatic environments. These mixtures are complex and often site-specific. Street drains provide an ideal sampling point given they collect the runoff from local and defined catchments. In this study, runoff was collected and sampled in five street drains located in a medium sized town in Germany. A specially constructed trap was used to collect the particulate and total water fractions of the runoff. In addition, passive samplers were deployed to determine the freely dissolved concentrations of selected compounds in the runoff. In sum, 187 polar organic micropollutants could be quantified using LC-HRMS. Thirty of these could only be detected by the use of passive samplers. Traffic derived pollutants such as corrosion inhibitors, rubber- and plastic additives, but also pollutants of industrial origin were strongly represented with sum median concentrations of 100 μg/kg dry weight (DW) in the sediment and 400 ng/L in the water fraction. Several of these substances are of concern due to their environmental persistence and mobility. Perfluorinated compounds and pesticides occurred at lower levels of several μg/kg DW sediment or ng/L water. A number of substances including pharmaceuticals, sweeteners and stimulants indicated domestic wastewater influences. Furthermore, a total of 62 parent and alkylated PAHs were quantified by GC-MS and contributed 30–70% to the sum concentrations of the micropollutants. Non-EPA PAHs dominated the carcinogenic PAH toxicity. The increased PAH alkylation indices (0.7–0.9) showed these primarily came from combustion sources. The runoff particles were additionally microscopically characterized, and correlations were found between the rubber particle counts and the PAH alkylation-index as well as the levels of 2-(methylthio)benzothiazole, a marker compound for tire leaching. [Display omitted] • Urban runoff traps were suitable to obtain samples from defined catchments. • PAHs, benzothiazoles, benzotriazoles and organophosphates dominated runoff. • Pharmaceuticals, sweeteners and stimulants indicated domestic influences in runoff. • Alkylated-PAH-BPCA-indices point to mainly pyrogenic PAH sources. • PAH alkylation-index and 2-(methylthio)benzothiazole correlated with tire particle counts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thermal use of the shallow subsurface and its aquifers (< 400 m) is steadily increasing. Currently, more than 2800 aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES) systems are operating worldwide alongside more than 1.2 million ground source heat pump (GSHP) systems in Europe alone. These rising numbers of shallow geothermal energy (SGE) systems will put additional pressure on typically vulnerable groundwater systems. Hitherto, suitable criteria to control the thermal use of groundwater in national and international legislations are often still at a preliminary state or even non-existing. While the European Union (EU) Water Framework Directive (WFD) defined the release of heat into the groundwater as pollution in the year 2000, the cooling of groundwater for heating purposes is not explicitly mentioned yet. In contrast, some national legislations have stricter guidelines. For example, in Germany, detrimental changes in physical, chemical and biological characteristics have to be avoided. In the Swiss water ordinance, it is even recommended that the groundwater biocenosis should be kept in natural state. However, exact definitions of 'detrimental changes' and 'natural state' are still missing. Hence, the current study provides an overview on natural and affected thermal groundwater conditions and international and national legislations of the thermal use of groundwater. Also, it presents recent studies on groundwater ecosystems and proposes a sustainable policy framework for the thermal use of groundwater. In addition to geothermal heat sources, other anthropogenic heat sources such as climate change, underground car parks, heated basements, district heating systems, land fills, wastewater treatment plants and mining are considered, although no legislation on these anthropogenic heat sources and their impact on groundwater is currently in place. Finally, we intend to answer the above question and provide recommendations for the further discussions on the joint use of shallow groundwater systems for drinking water production and thermal use., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Geological structures are by nature inaccessible to direct observation. This can cause difficulties in applications where a spatially explicit representation of such structures is required, in particular when modelling fluid migration in geological formations. An increasing trend in recent years has been to use analogs to palliate this lack of knowledge, i.e., exploiting the spatial information from sites where the geology is accessible (outcrops, quarry sites) and transferring the observed properties to a study site deemed geologically similar. While this approach is appealing, it is difficult to put in place because of the lack of access to well-documented analog data. In this paper we present comprehensive analog data sets which characterize sedimentary structures from important groundwater hosting formations in Germany and Brazil. Multiple 2-D outcrop faces are described in terms of hydraulic, thermal and chemical properties and interpolated in 3-D using stochastic techniques. These unique data sets can be used by the wider community to implement analog approaches for characterizing reservoir and aquifer formations.

In industrialized countries, large amounts of mineral wastes are produced. They are re-used in various ways, particularly in road and earth constructions, substituting primary resources such as gravel. However, they may also contain pollutants, such as heavy metals, which may be leached to the groundwater. The toxic impacts of these emissions are so far often neglected within Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) of products or waste treatment services and thus, potentially large environmental impacts are currently missed. This study aims at closing this gap by assessing the ecotoxic impacts of heavy metal leaching from industrial mineral wastes in road and earth constructions. The flows of metals such as Sb, As, Pb, Cd, Cr, Cu, Mo, Ni, V and Zn originating from three typical constructions to the environment are quantified, their fate in the environment is assessed and potential ecotoxic effects evaluated. For our reference country, Germany, the industrial wastes that are applied as Granular Secondary Construction Material (GSCM) carry more than 45,000 t of diverse heavy metals per year. Depending on the material quality and construction type applied, up to 150 t of heavy metals may leach to the environment within the first 100 years after construction. Heavy metal retardation in subsoil can potentially reduce the fate to groundwater by up to 100%. One major challenge of integrating leaching from constructions into macro-scale LCA frameworks is the high variability in micro-scale technical and geographical factors, such as material qualities, construction types and soil types. In our work, we consider a broad range of parameter values in the modeling of leaching and fate. This allows distinguishing between the impacts of various road constructions, as well as sites with different soil properties. The findings of this study promote the quantitative consideration of environmental impacts of long-term leaching in Life Cycle Assessment, complementing site-specific risk assessment, for the design of waste management strategies, particularly in the construction sector., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Anthropogenic alterations in urban areas influence the thermal environment causing elevated atmospheric and subsurface temperatures. The subsurface urban heat island effect is observed in several cities. Often shallow urban aquifers exist with thermal anomalies that spread laterally and vertically, resulting in the long-term accumulation of heat. In this study, we develop an analytical heat flux model to investigate possible drivers such as increased ground surface temperatures (GSTs) at artificial surfaces and heat losses from basements of buildings, sewage systems, subsurface district heating networks, and reinjection of thermal wastewater. By modeling the anthropogenic heat flux into the subsurface of the city of Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1977 and 2011, we evaluate long-term trends in the heat flux processes. It revealed that elevated GST and heat loss from basements are dominant factors in the heat anomalies. The average total urban heat flux into the shallow aquifer in Karlsruhe was found to be ∼759 ± 89 mW/m(2) in 1977 and 828 ± 143 mW/m(2) in 2011, which represents an annual energy gain of around 1.0 × 10(15) J. However, the amount of thermal energy originating from the individual heat flux processes has changed significantly over the past three decades.

Groundwater remediation technologies, such as pump-and-treat (PTS) and funnel-and-gate systems (FGS), aim at reducing locally appearing contaminations. Therefore, these methodologies are basically evaluated with respect to their capability to yield local improvements of an environmental situation, commonly neglecting that their application is also associated with secondary impacts. Life cycle assessment (LCA) represents a widely accepted method of assessing the environmental aspects and potential impacts related to a product, process or service. This study presents the set-up of a LCA framework in order to compare the secondary impacts caused by two conceptually different technologies at the site of a former manufactured gas plant in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. As a FGS is already operating at this site, a hypothetical PTS of the same functionality is adopted. During the LCA, the remediation systems are evaluated by focusing on the main technical elements and their significance with respect to resource depletion and potential adverse effects on ecological quality, as well as on human health. Seven impact categories are distinguished to address a broad spectrum of possible environmental loads. A main point of discussion is the reliability of technical assumptions and performance predictions for the future. It is obvious that a high uncertainty exists when estimating impact specific indicator values over operation times of decades. An uncertainty analysis is conducted to include the imprecision of the underlying emission and consumption data and a scenario analysis is utilised to contrast various possible technological variants. Though the results of the study are highly site-specific, a generalised relative evaluation of potential impacts and their main sources is the principle objective rather than a discussion of the calculated absolute impacts. A crucial finding that can be applied to any other site is the central role of steel, which particularly derogates the valuation of FGS due to the associated emissions that are harmful to human health. In view of that, environmental credits can be achieved by selecting a mineral-based wall instead of sheet piles for the funnel construction and by minimising the steel consumption for the gate construction. Granular activated carbon (GAC) is exclusively considered as the treatment material, both in-situ and on-site. Here it is identified as an additional main determinant of the relative assessment of the technologies since it is continuously consumed.