Development of Environmental Methods Facilitating the Sustainable Development and By-product Synergy in Georgia and South Caucasian Countries

Achieving Sustainable development is one of the most important problems of modern Society. Sustainable Development must balance the needs of society, the economy, and the environment. Therefore, it is important to be able to influence the factors that determine the current level of sustainable development. The main determining factors can be divided into three groups: economic, social and environmental. Environment attracts increasing attention of researchers. Today's understanding of SD recognizes it's environmental (ecological), economic and social underpinning (the so called “triangle” of SD), although previously the economic and social origins were thought to be dominant. This understanding corresponds to the concept of Synergy as one of the fundamental requirements for achieving SD. From this perspective, The Republic of Georgia is of particular interest since in a relatively small geographic area there are located more than 120 million tons of toxic waste. In this manuscript, we examined the action of microwave pretreatment on the bacterial and chemical leachability of arsenic and manganese containing waste and whether pretreatment increased the effectiveness of ‘soft remediation’ in areas contaminated with arsenic and manganese. Some important physical and chemical parameters of the microwave pretreatment were determined. Three different sources for microwave and conventional treatment were used. The average energy of the microwave oven was about nine times higher than that of the pulsed one (550 W versus 60 W). The Electric furnace had the same heating power, as the electric oven. The microwave heating was more efficient for all sampels. Taking in account the low average power of the pulsed generator it can be councluded that heating was more efficient in the pulsed generator than in the microwave oven. Environmental and economic impacts of the implementation of microwave pretreatment in remediation methods for industrial utilization of hazardous waste remediation in Georgia was estimated. Our study showed the possible advantages of the developed methods included: low costs of environmentally friendly methods of soft remediation; high economic efficiency of industrial utilization of hazardous waste; high effectivity of decontamination and remediation achievable by microvave enhanced methods.