When playing in sandboxes, children are particularly vulnerable to poisoning with potentially toxic elements (PTE) due to their hand-to-mouth behaviour. In Slovenia, the city of Celje is heavily ...contaminated due to zinc ore smelting and iron industry. In some sandboxes, sand from Mežica Pb-Zn mine waste was used. Granulometric and XRF analysis showed that all samples contain larger percentage of fine-sized particles and some have higher As, Ba, Cd, Pb and Zn contents than allowed. By XRD and SEM/EDS analysis we identified carries of PTE, and confirmed three possible sources of contamination: the waste material from the Pb-Zn mine, the emissions from local industry and from the old Zn-smelting stockpile used as a landfill. The total health risk (ΣHI) exceeds critical value in one sandbox. The bioaccessibility of PTEs is alarming due to presence of highly soluble metal-bearing particles. Study revealed importance of combining results of health risk evaluation with bioaccessibility of elements, which is a function of the carriers of PTE. This knowledge is essential for undertaking remedial measures. Improper use of waste material could result in introducing hazardous material in the environment. We propose frequent replacement of sand and stricter legislation regulating status and usage of waste materials.
Display omitted
•Playground sandboxes and nearby soils are contaminated with PTE.•PTE sources are mine waste used as sand and local Zn-smelter stockpile resuspension.•PTE carriers are Pb-Zn ore minerals, Zn-smelting slag and pigments.•Improper reuse of mine waste material is important contamination source.•health risk indices are low, but high PTE bioaccessibility is of great concern.
Barbara Celjska je bila gotovo najbogatejša alkimistka vseh časov. Prispevek skuša pojasniti kakšni poskusi so potekali v njenem laboratoriju in nakazati, katere tehniške kemijske naprave je utegnila ...pri tem uporabljati. Ker je bila večina le-teh iz zlahka lomljivih snovi, bi bilo njihovo iskanje bržkone brez haska, saj ni veliko upanja za njihovo ohranitev. Chemical Laboratory of Celje Queen (at 580th Anniversary of Bohemian coronation of Queen Barbara of Celje) Barbara of Cilli was certainly the richest female alchemist of all times. The article tries to explain what kind of experiments she carried out in her laboratory and indicate which technical chemical plant she likely has used. The major part her tools was made from easily breakable materials, therefore any contemporary pursuit to locate them will be probably in vain, because there is not much hope for their preservation.
In the current public discourse memory is among the most common words, concepts, and contents of a multiplicity of meanings, connotations and contexts. Besides personal memory, the interpretations of ...our past and consequently our present often include refer-ences of collective and historical memory. This termi-nology is particularly popular with politicians and pub-licists striving for a more colourful vocabulary, who often use the fore mentioned terms as synonyms. Scien-tific and professional circles are more conscientious at differentiating these terms, as their research focuses on studying the past and, consequently, on the role of memory or on the very process of remembering. Howev-er, within this corpus certain differences in the termi-nology and different views on the types and forms of memory do exist. In this paper, rather than psychologi-cal and sociological theories (by Maurice Halbwachs and others) we focus on how we, historians, look on the vari-ous forms of memory, especially those historians who study (still "alive") 20th century. And who in their work, let it be research, teaching, or, like in my case - work in a museum, rely on both, individual memories and collec-tive memory to shape the historical memory of a com-munity or society. Although greater terminological clari-ty in this regard would be more than welcome, it is most important that we correctly identify the different forms and types of memory and its components and that we use them appropriately in our work - that is in research, understanding and interpreting our past or our history. Even more so because they often intertwine with each other, overlap, complement, and transform from one to another, or, sometimes even exclude each other. There-fore it is often difficult to clearly distinguish one from another and to deal with them separately. Historians working in the Museum of Recent History Celje are faced with these issues and problems on a daily basis; many specific examples of our work further de-monstrate the moulding complexity of memory and its forms and go beyond the theoretical classifications and division.
Since its inception, the project Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) has played a major role in the creation of an inventory of preserved early music heritage in Slovenia. This ...article presents the background and the current state of cooperation between Slovenian musicology and the RISM project, focusing on the latest additions to the online catalogue from the music collection of the Church of St Daniel in Celje.
ŽITNICA STAROGA GRADA VARAŽDINA Ćurić, Anka; Škarpa Dubreta, Daria
Radovi Zavoda za znanstveni rad Varaždin,
2019, Letnik:
30, Številka:
30
Journal Article, Paper
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The paper presents the findings of conservation-restoration explorations of the building located in the south-western corner of the former county prefect’s castrum plateau, recognized as the granary ...of the counts of Celje in the eastern part, and the Varaždin general headquarters’ armoury in the western. During the explorations, the published references, as well as the available archival materials have been processed and analysed. During field work, methods of visual analysis and probing of the construction material, the plastered and paint layers have been used. Apart from conservation-restoration works, geophysical explorations were also undertaken, as well as the test archaeological probing on certain locations. The present building is located within the perimeter of the estate that had belonged, since its very foundation, to the fortified royal county prefect’s castrum. That is why it seems impossible that such an estate could hold within the property of a citizen, which is one of the arguments of older historiography for attributing the lower part of the building to the granary of the Counts of Celje. The other argument concerns the stone wall frames with gothic profiling, for which the exploration findings from the building’s interior have unequivocally shown that they were added at a later time.
The aim of this research was to determine how fast the level of heavy metal concentrations in the air decreases in relation to increasing distance from the source of pollution and what the influence ...area is of the zinc smelting plant which existed for 100 years in Celje. In that period it produced approximately 580,000 tons of raw Zn from sphalerite ore by the pyrometallurgical process. The production left behind a heavily contaminated area, where the concentrations of Pb and Zn in the soil can be expressed as a percentage. A model has been made on the basis of the data of concentrations of Zn and Cd in the soil and attic dust regarding the distance and direction from the source of the pollution. Because Celje lies in a basin we chose a linear model, which describes the decreasing of the concentrations of Zn and Cd only in one direction. Sampling has been conducted on the four river valleys which stretch from the source of the pollution in all four directions: north, west, south and east, up to 13 km from the source. The power function with a negative exponent was used. With the solution to the calculated functions according to the distance, we can estimate the theoretical distance when the concentrations drop to the natural background level. The range of influence of the zinc smelting plant has been estimated to be between 14 and 52 km for the presence of anthropogenic Zn in attic dust and between 9 and 14 km for the presence of anthropogenic Zn in the soil, depending on the direction from the plant. Correlations between the measured values and the ones from the model are high: from 0.75 up to 0.98.
PDF
