Journal of Hazardous Materials

The Journal of Hazardous Materials is an international forum that advances world class research by publishing articles in the areas of Environmental Science and Engineering. We publish full-length research papers, review articles, and perspectives that improve our understanding of the hazards and risks that certain materials pose to public health and the environment. Authors are supposed to address two questions in their manuscripts: 1) is the studied subject an environmental contaminant? and 2) is the study conducted under an environmentally relevant condition?

"Environmental contaminants" exclude the compounds that do not exert hazardous effects on the environment or humans via contamination. Of note, difference between wastes and hazardous materials needs to be spotlighted to further clarify the JHM scope. The journal is highly interested in specific compounds or microbial agents with environmentally hazardous effects.

"Environmentally relevant conditions" typically require an experiment or modeling study to be conducted with the consideration of environmental factors, such as temperature, pH, environmental matrix constituents, and chemical doses for waste removal, within their respective realistic occurrence ranges. Particularly, we have noticed that studies on nanomaterials or emerging contaminants (e.g., sensing/detection, effects, and removal) in many manuscripts were performed with unrealistically high concentrations, which can be several orders of magnitude higher than their real occurrence ranges in an environmental medium.

Environmental implications from such studies would be very limited. Although higher concentrations may exhibit a full spectrum of hazardous effects, a manuscript ought to embrace realistic level(s) of a hazardous material in the range of the studied concentrations.

Examples of the topics that are outside the journal's scope can be found in this editorial: Refining the scope of Journal of Hazardous Materials