A historical context of municipal solid waste management in the United States.

Municipal solid waste management (MSWM) in the United States is a system comprised of regulatory, administrative, market, technology, and social subcomponents, and can only be understood in the context of its historical evolution. American cities lacked organized public works for street cleaning, refuse collection, water treatment, and human waste removal until the early 1800s. Recurrent epidemics forced efforts to improve public health and the environment. The belief in anticontagionism led to the construction of water treatment and sewerage works during the nineteenth century, by sanitary engineers working for regional public health authorities. This infrastructure was capital intensive and required regional institutions to finance and administer it. By the time attention turned to solid waste management in the 1880s, funding was not available for a regional infrastructure. Thus, solid waste management was established as a local responsibility, centred on nearby municipal dumps. George Waring of New York City organized solid waste management around engineering unit operations; including street sweeping, refuse collection, transportation, resource recovery and disposal. This approach was adopted nationwide, and was managed by City Departments of Sanitation. Innovations such as the introduction of trucks, motorized street sweepers, incineration, and sanitary landfill were developed in the following decades. The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 (RCRA), is the defining legislation for MSWM practice in America today. It forced the closure of open dumps nationwide, and required regional planning for MSWM. The closure of municipal dumps caused a 'garbage crisis' in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Private companies assumed an expanded role in MSWM through regional facilities that required the transportation of MSW across state lines. These transboundary movements of MSW created the issue of flow control, in which the US Supreme Court affirmed the protection of garbage under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. Thus MSWM in America today is largely managed by municipalities, and operated by a relatively small number of private companies. It consists of a mixture of landfill, incineration, recycling, and composting, and is regulated under RCRA, the Clean Air Act and other related federal and state laws.     

Substance use and functional impairment among adolescents directly exposed to the 2001 World Trade Center attacks

The relationship between exposure to the World Trade Center (WTC) attacks, increased substance use, functional impairment and mental health service use, controlling for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, was assessed through an in-school survey of directly exposed students (N = 1040) attending the five middle and five high schools nearest the WTC. The survey was conducted 18 months after the attacks. Students with one WTC exposure risk factor had a five-fold increase in substance use, while those with three or more exposure risks had a nearly 19-fold increase. Increased substance use was associated with impaired school work, school behaviour and grades. Students reporting increased substance use were nearly twice as likely to want help but were no more likely than asymptomatic students to receive services. Adolescents reporting increased substance use, without co-morbidity, were less likely to receive psychological services than others. Attention to the needs of substance-using adolescents exposed to disaster is needed.     

Survey of urinary nickel in residents of areas with a high density of electroplating factories

The soil metal contamination arising from the discharge of the high density of electroplating factories in the geographic center of Taiwan has prompted concern about human exposure to harmful metals. This study aimed to determine the levels of nickel (Ni) in urine of residents living in the high vs. low factory-density areas, and to examine how these levels relate to gender and age. A total of 660 subjects, resident in the area for the last five years, were sampled according to the stratified random sampling approach, at ages 35-44, 45-54, and 55-64years for both genders. Metals in urine samples were analyzed by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICPMS). The geometric mean (95% confidence interval (CI)) of urinary Ni was 6.30 (5.99-6.62)mug/l. The 0.95 parametric reference interval (90% CI) of urinary Ni was estimated to be 1.74 (1.62-1.88) to 22.73 (21.14-24.44)mug/l. Subjects in the areas with a high density of electroplating factories had significantly higher urinary Ni levels than those in the low-density areas, but both types of areas had obviously higher urinary Ni levels when compared to the non-occupationally exposed population from western countries. The health significance of elevated urinary Ni and its causative factors remain to be determined.     

Wintering Waterbirds and Recreationists in Natural Areas: A Sociological Approach to the Awareness of Bird Disturbance

Disturbance to wintering birds by human recreational activities has become a major concern for managers of many natural areas. Few studies have examined how recreationists perceive their effects on birds, although this impacts their behavior on natural areas. We surveyed 312 users on two coastal ornithological sites in Brittany, France, to investigate their perception of the effects of human activities on wintering birds. The results show that the awareness of environmental issues and knowledge of bird disturbance depends on the socioeconomic characteristics of each user group, both between the two sites and within each site. Results also indicate that, whatever the site and the user group, the vast majority of the respondents (77.6 %) believed that their own presence had no adverse effects on the local bird population. Various arguments were put forward to justify the users’ own harmlessness. Objective information on recreationists’ awareness of environmental issues, and particularly on their own impact on birds, is important to guide managers in their choice of the most appropriate visitor educational programs. We recommend developing global but also specific educational information for each type of user to raise awareness of their own impact on birds.     

Characterization of fuel gas products from the treatment of solid waste streams with a plasma arc torch

This work addresses the plasma treatment of two solid waste streams and production of fuel gases from the process. In this study, carpet waste and simulated solid wastes generated by a United States Air Force Basic Expeditionary Airfield Resources Base deployment were used. Waste was treated in a furnace fitted with a 100kW plasma arc torch. The off gas was analyzed to determine its composition. The product gas was composed primarily of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, with small amounts of methane, benzene and toluene also detected. These experiments demonstrate the feasibility of producing fuel gases by plasma treatment of the solid waste streams. While the thermal energy value of the fuel gas produced in these experiments was less than the energy input, a higher waste-to-fuel gas conversion efficiency is expected in full-scale application.     

Consensus Building and Sustainability: Some Lessons From an Adverse Local Experience in Greece

The paper focuses on the example of a local island community in Greece, to illustrate the difficulties of effective consensus building, in support of sustainable policies. In the first section the issue of sustainability and the importance of participation are discussed, before moving to a brief outline of the nature of participation and its sources since the 1960s. It follows an analysis of the epistemological framework of consensus building process which is considered as the most integrated and sophisticated version of participatory planning. This analysis serves as a background for judging the appropriateness of consensus building for the resolution of an environmental problem harassing a Greek island community. It is about the problem of water availability and management in the small Aegean island of Leros. The paper shows how illegal practices in the use of water, administrative fragmentation and confusion over knowledge of the problem and its solutions lead to divisions in the stakeholder groups and to obstacles in the way of participation. The intrinsic problems embedded in Greek (and probably not alone) society and political culture, which prevent collective action and participation, account in part for the anticipated risk of unwelcome, illegitimate outcomes of a potential consensus building process. Nevertheless, if communicative planning is to gain universal acceptance, it should first resolve some critical theoretical and practical shortcomings related to its normative, ethical and philosophical assumptions. Readers should send their comments on this paper to: BhaskarNath@aol.com within 3 months of publication of this issue.     

Watershed surveys to support an assessment of the regional effects of acidic deposition on surface water chemistry

Through the Direct/Delayed Response Project (DDRP), the United States Environmental Protection Agency is attempting to assess the risk to surface waters from acidic deposition in three regions of the eastern United States: the Northeast Region, the Southern Blue Ridge Province, and the Mid-Appalachian Region. The central policy question being addressed by the DDRP is: Within the regions of concern, how many surface water systems (lakes, streams) will become acidic due to current or altered levels of acidic sulfur deposition, and on what time scales? The approach taken by the DDRP is to select a statistically representative set of watersheds in each region of concern and to project the future response of each watershed to various assumed levels of acidic deposition. The probability structure will then be used to extrapolate the watershed-specific results to each region. The data will be used also for statistical investigation of hypothesized relationships between current surface water chemistry and watershed characteristics. Because the needed terrestrial data base was not available, regional watershed surveys were conducted to meet the specific data needs of the DDRP. Maps (1∶24,000) of soils, vegetation, land use, depth to bedrock, and bedrock geology were made for each watershed. The soils were grouped into sampling classes based on their hypothesized response to acidic deposition. Randomized sampling of these classes provided regional means and variances of soil properties that can be applied to individual watersheds. Because of DDRP's need for consistency within and among regions, unique quality control/quality assurance activities were developed and implemented. After verification and validation, the DDRP data base will be made publicly available. This will be a unique and useful resource for others investigating watershed relationships on a regional scale. The results of these surveys and the conclusions of the DDRP will be presented in several future papers. The current paper gives an overview of the context, rationale, logistical considerations, and implementation of these surveys, with special emphasis on the field activities of watershed mapping and soil sampling. This discussion should be useful to those planning, implementing, and managing survey activities in support of regional assessments of other environmental concerns, who are likely to face similar choices and constraints.