Waste-Site Stories

Waste-Site Stories
Author: Brian Neville
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0791488780

Ours is a wasteful society, consumed with care for its remains, according to the contributors of Waste-Site Stories. Here scholars from around the world probe current notions of waste and the ways in which remains of different kinds recover value in the act of recollection and recycling. In the wake of destructive experiences that continue to trouble memory, there is something compelling about today's theoretical and artistic interest in waste and recycling. The two terms provide a purchase on changing conditions of cultural memory, on technological development and its sometimes toxic ecological and social fallout, and on the legacy of personal and historical trauma. They suggest new resources for the stories of our engagement with the things of the past and the sites where traces of history survive.

Waste Management

Waste Management
Author: Timothy C. Jacobson
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Total Pages: 378
Release: 1993
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

"In the beginning we knew them as scavengers. Then as garbagemen. Then solid waste haulers. Then the dispensers of sophisticated environmental services. The changing language charts the evolution of a huge industry. No company better represents this industry than Waste Management, today the largest and most successful provider of environmental management services in the world." "The range of capabilities that Waste Management's family of companies offers today represents a wish-list of services for the environmentally awakened end of the twentieth century. It includes collecting, disposing, and reusing solid waste in sanitary landfills, incinerators, and through recycling; managing all forms of hazardous wastes through treatment, incineration, and recovery processes; remedying chemical waste pollution; managing medical waste; transporting and securing disposal of low-level nuclear wastes; generating a scarce commodity, energy (chiefly electricity), from an abundant one, garbage, in waste-to-energy incinerators and through methane gas recovery from landfills; and programs to encourage waste-reduction and recycling-the greatest of all environmental crusades." "A list of the company's accomplishments abounds with superlatives which are important less as a boast than as an indicator of scale. Waste Management is the nations largest handler of solid and chemical waste; the largest asbestos-abatement company; the largest private waste-water treatment company; the largest low-level radioactive waste management company; the largest wastereduction consultancy; the third largest engineering firm; and one of the largest managers of medical waste. The company is the largest buyer of trucks and containers, whose burgundy color is recognized in cities and towns everywhere." "What we once viewed merely as a problem of sanitation of conservation, we embrace today under the banner of environmentalism. To some, who have appropriated the word "green" for their cause, environmentalism has become a fierce ideology. To others, like Dean Buntrock, founder and chairman of Waste Management, Inc., it has become an opportunity to provide a vital service and build one of the world's most successful companies in the process. As our cultural attitudes have shifted and as the regulations regarding waste have multiplied, markets have been created and sustained. For those with the right combination of foresight and know-how, the opportunities have been enormous." "Waste Management explains how Waste Management, Inc. shaped and was shaped by those opportunities. It describes how, in the last twenty years, one of America's great companies has embraced change and created wealth as it grew."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Waste

Waste
Author: Catherine Coleman Flowers
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2020-11-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1620976099

The MacArthur grant–winning environmental justice activist’s riveting memoir of a life fighting for a cleaner future for America’s most vulnerable A Smithsonian Magazine Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020 Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur “genius,” grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is also Flowers’s life’s work—a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America’s dirty secret. In this “powerful and moving book” (Booklist), she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West. In this inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards—not only those of poor minorities.

Laying Waste

Laying Waste
Author: Michael Brown
Publisher: Pocket Books
Total Pages: 388
Release: 1981
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780671453596

A Niagara Falls, N.Y., reporter uncovered the Love Canal toxic waste scandal in 1978, and now relates tales of thousands of chemical dumps that contaminate waters, soil and air in the United States.

Decision-making and Radioactive Waste Disposal

Decision-making and Radioactive Waste Disposal
Author: Andrew Newman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2015-11-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1136686398

The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that nuclear power generation facilities produce about 200,000 cubic meters of low and intermediate-level waste each year. Vital medical procedures, industrial processes and basic science research also produce significant quantities of waste. All of this waste must be shielded from the population for extended periods of time. Finding suitable locations for disposal facilities is beset by two main problems: community responses to siting proposals are generally antagonistic and, as a result, governments have tended to be reactive in their policy-making. Decision-making and Radioactive Waste Disposal explores these issues utilizing a linear narrative case study approach that critically examines key stakeholder interactions in order to explain how siting decisions for low level waste disposal are made. Five countries are featured: the US, Australia, Spain, South Korea and Switzerland. This book seeks to establish an understanding of the political, economic, environmental, legal and social dimensions of siting across those countries. This valuable resource fills a gap in the literature and provides recommendations for future disposal facility siting efforts. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental law, justice, management, politics, energy and security policy as well as decision-makers in government and industry.

Waste

Waste
Author: Kate O'Neill
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2019-09-04
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0745687431

Waste is one of the planet’s last great resource frontiers. From furniture made from up-cycled wood to gold extracted from computer circuit boards, artisans and multinational corporations alike are finding ways to profit from waste while diverting materials from overcrowded landfills. Yet beyond these benefits, this “new” resource still poses serious risks to human health and the environment. In this unique book, Kate O’Neill traces the emergence of the global political economy of wastes over the past two decades. She explains how the emergence of waste governance initiatives and mechanisms can help us deal with both the risks and the opportunities associated with the hundreds of millions – possibly billions – of tons of waste we generate each year. Drawing on a range of fascinating case studies to develop her arguments, including China’s role as the primary recipient of recyclable plastics and scrap paper from the Western world, “Zero-Waste” initiatives, the emergence of transnational waste-pickers’ alliances, and alternatives for managing growing volumes of electronic and food wastes, O’Neill shows how waste can be a risk, a resource, and even a livelihood, with implications for governance at local, national, and global levels.

Hazardous Waste Sites

Hazardous Waste Sites
Author: Michael R. Greenberg
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Total Pages: 296
Release: 1984-11-01
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1412850436

Mutual distrust defines the relationship between those who are the sources of hazardous wastes and those who oversee their activities. A lack of credibility, argue the authors, is a formidable, if not the biggest, obstacle to properly managing hazardous waste in the United States. Nowhere is the credibility gap wider than where there are hazardous waste management facilities or where sites have been proposed. The purpose of this book is to provide comprehensive perspectives on hazardous waste sites in the United States. The sources of hazardous waste are described along with the scientific and legal climates that allowed wastes to be discarded with little attention to impacts. Evidence is weighed for and against public health, as well as environmental, economic, and social damages at abandoned sites. Political processes and analytical techniques are suggested and illustrated for those who are involved in the siting of new facilities. A strategy for hazardous waste management is offered, together with approaches to substantially reduce the difficulties faced by local planners and site managers who face a hostile public. A historical legacy of mismanagement, fueled by exaggeration of impacts and by a lack of information, characterizes hazardous waste management in the United States. This book will be important to planners, environmental scientists, and public health officials. In order to assure accessibility for the casual reader, the authors keep the explanation of mathematical methods and technologies in this area to a minimum.

Waste Siege

Waste Siege
Author: Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2019-12-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 150361090X

Waste Siege offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it depicts the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians are obliged to forge their lives. To speak of waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. Within this rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout, West Bank Palestinians create a life under settler colonial rule. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins focuses on waste as an experience of everyday life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing Palestinians' own experiences of wastes over the past decade, she considers how multiple authorities governing the West Bank—including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, NGOs, and Israel—rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not. Her work challenges both common formulations of waste as "matter out of place" and as the ontological opposite of the environment, by suggesting instead that waste siege be understood as an ecology of "matter with no place to go." Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet.

Digital Rubbish

Digital Rubbish
Author: Jennifer Gabrys
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2013-04-26
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0472035371

This is a study of the material life of information and its devices; of electronic waste in its physical and electronic incarnations; a cultural and material mapping of the spaces where electronics in the form of both hardware and information accumulate, break down, or are stowed away. Where other studies have addressed "digital" technology through a focus on its immateriality or virtual qualities, Gabrys traces the material, spatial, cultural and political infrastructures that enable the emergence and dissolution of these technologies. In the course of her book, she explores five interrelated "spaces" where electronics fall apart: from Silicon Valley to Nasdaq, from containers bound for China to museums and archives that preserve obsolete electronics as cultural artifacts, to the landfill as material repository. Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics describes the materiality of electronics from a unique perspective, examining the multiple forms of waste that electronics create as evidence of the resources, labor, and imaginaries that are bundled into these machines. Ranging across studies of media and technology, as well as environments, geography, and design, Jennifer Gabrys draws together the far-reaching material and cultural processes that enable the making and breaking of these technologies.

Solid Waste: Assessment, Monitoring and Remediation

Solid Waste: Assessment, Monitoring and Remediation
Author: I. Twardowska
Publisher: Gulf Professional Publishing
Total Pages: 1161
Release: 2004-04-22
Genre: Science
ISBN: 008054147X

This book covers a broad group of wastes, from biowaste to hazardous waste, but primarily the largest (by mass and volume) group of wastes that are not hazardous, but also are not inert, and are problematic for three major reasons: (1) they are difficult to manage because of their volume: usually they are used in civil engineering as a common fill etc., where they are exposed to environmental conditions almost the same way as at disposal sites; (2) they are not geochemically stable and in the different periods of environmental exposure undergo transformations that might add hazardous properties to the material that are not displayed when it is freshly generated; (3) many designers and researchers in different countries involved in waste management are often not aware of time-delayed adverse environmental impact of some large-volume waste, and also do not consider some positive properties that may extend the area of their environmentally beneficial application.