Participatory GIS and the Riparian gyre: Putting trash in its place
- Introduction (TMH/BLM)
- Mapping and Managing Trash (BLM/FL) 1500 words
- Implicit(?) Location
- Fixed and known
Solid Waste
Klingle, Matthew. Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle(New Haven: Yale University 2007)
In his work, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle, Matthew Klingle states that history is inseparable from place. He states that despite Seattle’s environmental powerhouse position, it was less than fifteen years ago that the National Marine Fisheries Service declared Seattle and neighboring Portland to be the first urban area in the United States to become an Endangered Species Act listing. This meant that the Chinook salmon runs were stopped in order to protect the salmon. Since its founding, salmon has been Seattle and Seattle has been salmon but now they were becoming depleted and the ones that did survive couldn’t find streams to run in – over time lakes and rivers had become polluted by household trash, industrial pollution, and logging debris. Residents of Seattle were stunned since wild salmon were a part of their regional identity, Seattle still looked beautiful, how could this have happened with no one noticing? And who would they be without salmon? It was a wakeup call for Seattle’s mayor who now believes that “salmon became the fish that saved Seattle from itself”. Like many strategic plans which involve a region, it wasn’t without its vocal opponents, conflicts, or unseen repercussions. However, despite these challenges, it worked due to a concerted effort of stakeholders, businesses, residents, and community members. Klingle uses this example to introduce the “ethics of place”, the notion that human history is not always human and that what makes a community is often the sights, smells, and sounds of a placeWhile Seattle was able to remake itself, the Salmon that exist today aren’t wild but domestic farm salmon that swims back to a holding block and Seattleites buy salmon in the same frozen food aisle as everyone else in the United States. “Seattle residents have betrayed both salmon and one another by failing to heed the historical consequences of their evolving ethic of place” (Klingle 2007 p.10)
Land fills
Mark Monmonier, Chapter 13 The Three R's of Gis-Based Site Selection: Representation, Resistance, and Ridicule, In: D.R. Fraser Taylor, Editor(s), Modern Cartography Series, Academic Press, 1998, Volume 3, Policy issues in modern Cartography, Pages 233-247
Monmonier looks at case studies of solid waste facility site selection where GIS was used to keep the public at arm’s length from decision making and community opposition reaction.
Simone Leao, Ian Bishop, David Evans, Assessing the demand of solid waste disposal in urban region by urban dynamics modelling in a GIS environment, Resources,Conservation and Recycling, Volume 33, Issue 4, November 2001, Pages 289-313
“The twentieth century saw a dramatic increase in the production of urban solid waste, reflecting unprecedented global levels of economic activity. Despite some efforts to reduce and recover the waste, disposal in landfills is still the most usual destination. However, landfill has become more difficult to implement because of its increasing cost, community opposition to landfill siting, and more restrictive environmental regulations regarding the siting and operation of landfills. Moreover, disposal in landfill is the waste destination method with the largest demand for land, while land is a resource whose availability has been decreasing in urban systems. Shortage of land for landfills is a problem frequently cited in the literature as a physical constraint. Nonetheless, the shortage of land for waste disposal has not been fully studied and, in particular, quantified. This paper presents a method to quantify the relationship between the demand and supply of suitable land for waste disposal over time using a geographic information system and modelling techniques.”
“Nowadays, there is a general agreement on the best practices for sustainable management of urban solid wastes, and there are isolated experiences throughout the world applying these principles. However, the goal of sustainable waste management seems far from being reached. Reduction of waste production is still more a hope than an achievement in most countries.”“Many operational models have been created over the last few decades to assist in developing more efficient solid waste management programs. One typical issue addressed by these models is the search for best configurations for waste management systems that involve the best combination of waste facilities (usually landfill, incineration, recycling and/or composting) or the best flow of waste through a certain group of facilities at a certain moment of time. The economic optimisation functions in these models include costs (operation and/or transportation) and revenues from the sale of energy, organic compost, and recycled materials.”
V.R. Sumathi, UshaNatesan, ChinmoySarkar, GIS-based approach for optimized siting of municipal solid waste landfill, Waste Management, Volume 28, Issue 11, November 2008, Pages 2146-2160
“Sanitary landfill constitutes one of the primary methods of municipal solid waste disposal. Optimized siting decisions have gained considerable importance in order to ensure minimum damage to the various environmental sub-components as well as reduce the stigma associated with the residents living in its vicinity, thereby enhancing the overall sustainability associated with the life cycle of a landfill. This paper addresses the siting of a new landfill using a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and overlay analysis using a geographic information system (GIS). The proposed system can accommodate new information on the landfill site selection by updating its knowledge base. Several factors are considered in the siting process including geology, water supply resources, land use, sensitive sites, air quality and groundwater quality. Weightings were assigned to each criterion depending upon their relative importance and ratings in accordance with the relative magnitude of impact. The results from testing the system using different sites show the effectiveness of the system in the selection process.
Siting decisions are governed by the pre-existing land use dynamics of the urban area as well as the nature of potential interactions of the landfill with the pre-existing environmental, geologic, hydrological, and socio-economic parameters of the area. In the domain of the science of solid waste management, identification of landfill sites for solid waste disposal remains a critical management issue wherein the selection should be based on a number of considerations.”
“In recent years, GIS has emerged as a very important tool for land use suitability analysis. GIS can recognize, correlate and analyze the spatial relationship between mapped phenomena, thereby enabling policy-makers to link disparate sources of information, perform sophisticated analysis, visualize trends, project outcomes and strategize long-term planning goals (Malczewski,2004). GIS has often been employed for the siting and placement of facilities (Church, 2002)The pioneering work in this field was initiated byMcharg (1969) who enunciated the basic mapping ideas for site suitability analysis; especially those that involve delineating the best route connecting two points or identifying the best location for a specific function. His idea involved the preparation of thematic maps and superimposing them on top of one another to view the composite configuration so as to decide upon the most suitable location in relation to the pre-existing set of interacting factors. With the evolution of GIS and the subsequent developments in the field of location science, considerable focus was placed upon its potential application for optimized siting. The earliest application of GIS in this direction included the analysis conducted in the 1970s, especially those by (Kiefer and Robbins, 1973), (Durfee, 1974), (Voelker, 1976) and (Dobson, 1979). At about the same time, (Clark, 1970), (Helms and Clark, 1971) and Esmaili, 1972 H. Esmaili, Facility selection and haul optimization model, Journal of the Sanitary Engineering Division (1972), pp. 1005–1021.(Esmaili, 1972) generated models to determine facility locations, capacities and expansion patterns. Several realistic solid waste management models were formulated by applying and refining various optimization techniques. Fuertes (1974) included social equity issues in choosing the site for the facilities. The landfill selection problems have often been tackled using MCDA.
Some of the important applications of GIS for identifying potential waste disposal sites include the ones by (Muttiah et al., 1996), (Charnpratheep et al., 1997), (Kao, 1996), (Kao et al., 1997), (Lin and Kao, 1998), (Sarah and Susan, 2000), (Leao et al., 2001) and (Sadek et al., 2001).
Along with the proliferation of GIS technology, ever since the 1950s, multiple criteria decision making methods (MCDM) have evolved as a major tool to assist decision makers with analyzing and solving multiple criteria decision problems
An integrated approach incorporating the application of GIS and MCDA methods have been employed for the suitability analysis of landfills in an urban matrix ([Minor and Jacobs, 1994], [Kao and Lin, 1996], [Siddiqui et al., 1996], Lin and Kao, 1998 H. Lin and J. Kao, Enhanced spatial model for landfill siting analysis, Journal of Environmental Engineering125 (9) (1998), pp. 845–851.[Lin and Kao, 1998], [Allen et al., 2002] and [Kontos et al., 2005]).
Recycle centers/Waste Incinerators/ and other landfill alternatives
Gilpin R. Robinson Jr., Katherine E. Kapo, A GIS analysis of suitability for construction aggregate recycling sites using regional transportation network and population density features, Resources, Conservation and Recycling, Volume 42, Issue 4, November 2004, Pages 351-365,
This paper analyzes aggregate, or reclaimed asphalt pavement and cement concrete, operations in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbiato develop spatial association models for the recycled aggregate industry with regional transportation network and population density features. According to the study, “Transportation corridors provide both sites of likely road construction where aggregate is used and an efficient means to move both materials and on-site processing equipment back and forth from various work sites to the recycling operations.”
Benot Flahaut ;Marie-Alexandre Laurent ;Isabelle Thomas Locating a Community Recycling Center within a Residential Area: A Belgian Case StudyThe Professional Geographer, Volume 54, Issue 1 February 2002 , pages 67 – 82
“This article demonstrates the operation of a simple optimal location-allocation technique for solving the problem of locating one or several community recycling center(s) within a residential area. The article attempts to measure both transportation and externality costs in comparable units, and to incorporate them into the model. A sensitivity analysis of the results at the level of the nuisance provides further insight into the operation of the model and the relative importance of the quantification of pollution in applied location-allocation problems.”
CaterinaValeo, Brian W. Baetz, and Ioannis K. TsanisLocation of Recycling Depots with GIS J. Urban Plng. and Devel. Volume 124, Issue 2, pp. 93-99 (June 1998)
“Alocation-allocation model contained within a geographic information systems (GIS) softwarepackage was used to design a recycling depot scheme fora community of 22,000 people. Considered a less expensive alternativeto curbside recycling, the depot scheme would receive a varietyof recyclable materials from the public on a voluntary basis.Depot sites were located using a model that maximized thecoverage of a depot site, with constraints based on projected"recycler behavior." Shopping centers, municipal parking lots, and roadside siteswere candidate locations for recycling depots in the two modeledcases. A GIS-based approach is shown to be useful fordetermining the number and location of material recycling depots foruse within an integrated municipal solid waste management system.”
Strategic planning of recycling options by multi-objective programming in a GIS environment Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy Springer Berlin / Heidelberg Volume 7, Number 4 / November, 2005
SibelAlumur, Bahar Y. Kara, A new model for the hazardous waste location-routing problem, Computers & Operations Research, Volume 34, Issue 5, Hazardous Materials Transportation, May 2007, Pages 1406-1423,
“Hazardous waste management involves the collection, transportation, treatment and disposal of hazardous wastes. In this paper a new multiobjective location-routing model is proposed. Our model also includes some constraints, which were observed in the literature but were not incorporated into previous models. The aim of the proposed model is to answer the following questions: where to open treatment centers and with which technologies, where to open disposal centers, how to route different types of hazardous waste to which of the compatible treatment technologies, and how to route waste residues to disposal centers. The model has the objective of minimizing the total cost and the transportation risk. A large-scale implementation of the model in the Central Anatolian region of Turkey is presented.”
Commercial and Municipal Solid Waste Management
Julian P. Parfitt, Robin Flowerdew, Methodological problems in the generation of household waste statistics : An analysis of the United Kingdom's National Household Waste Analysis Programme, Applied Geography, Volume 17, Issue 3, July 1997, Pages 231-244
“The establishment of national targets designed to bring about more sustainable waste management in many developed countries has not generally been accompanied by the creation of reliable information systems for policy formulation and monitoring. In the first part of this paper the factors that complicate the collection of reliable household waste statistics are examined from both applied and theoretical perspectives. The second part presents a critique of the recent UK National Household Waste Analysis Programme (NHWAP). This was based on waste-collection-round samples selected by means of a geodemographie classification package (ACORN). NHWAP data are currently the only national data on household waste composition and the results have already been widely used by policy-makers at national and local levels. However, it is concluded that the NHWAP sample was too limited for there to be much confidence in the results. A national research programme based on household samples is required in order to understand the relationships between household waste arisings and socioeconomic, institutional, spatial and temporal variables.”
Marjorie J. Clarke, Juliana A. Maantay, Optimizing recycling in all of New York City's neighborhoods: Using GIS to develop the REAP index for improved recycling education, awareness, and participation, Resources, Conservation and Recycling, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2006, Pages 128-148
“New York City's recycling program began in 1988 with scattered pilot programs to collect a restricted number of recyclable categories. Over time, the program was made more uniform in its implementation, was expanded citywide, and targeted more types of recyclables. Although Department of Sanitation surveys have shown that residents in all areas of the city have understood the requirements of the recycling program, recycling diversion rates vary substantially throughout the city's neighborhoods, ranging from 9 to 31% per district, while city-wide the diversion rate averages only about 20%.This paper explores the possible reasons for the disparity of recycling participation rates amongst neighborhoods, using recycling data collected by the city and federal census information to characterize the city's neighborhoods and show variation in recycling participation rates, demographics, socio-economic indicators, and other metrics. Four variables were found to be strongly correlated with low diversion rates: percentage of persons below poverty level; percentage of households headed by a single female with children; percentage of adults without a high school diploma; and percentage of minority population.A weighted linear model is used to calculate a one-number descriptive measure, called the recycling education, awareness, and participation (REAP) index, which relates recycling behavior for each of New York City's 59 sanitation districts with demographic and socio-economic variables that might “predict” recycling rates. This REAP index can then be used to help inform decision- and policy-making about strategies for increasing recycling education, awareness, and participation, help target particular communities for assistance, and prioritize resources. The effects of rapid program changes and substandard residential recycling environments are also discussed as possible influences on recycling participation rates, as well as other attitudinal, physical, and knowledge-based factors that may be indirectly associated with low socio-economic status communities.”
Eklund, JörgenSorting and disposing of waste at recycling centres – A users perspective Applied Ergonomics; May2010, Vol. 41 Issue 3, p355-361, 7p
Abstract: This paper investigates Swedish recycling centres from the users'' perspective. The aim was to describe the characteristics and experiences of the users and their activities when sorting and disposing of waste, and to identify improvements for the users. The typical recycling centre user is a recently retired man, living in a house with a garden, having travelled 5km alone in his own car. The users requested longer opening hours and better information available at home and at the recycling centre. The major difficulty for the users is to understand which fraction their waste belongs to, and consequently into which container they should throw it. The most important sources of sorting information, in addition to experience from earlier visits, are signs and asking the personnel. Although the service at recycling centres is perceived positively by a majority of users, substantial improvements can still be made, and a number of such suggestions are given.
Jones, Nikoleta The influence of social capital on environmental policy instruments. Environmental Politics; Jul2009, Vol. 18 Issue 4, p595-611, 17p
“The literature connecting social capital with natural resources management has increased significantly in the past decade. Several studies have indicated that higher levels of social capital may lead to improved environmental management by communities. In this context, a multidimensional concept of social capital is used and its connection with environmental policy implementation is explored. The social capital components investigated are: social and institutional trust, social norms and social networks. This provides a first attempt to investigate the interconnections between these social capital components and different types of environmental policy instruments. Furthermore, social capital is connected to the constraints imposed by different instruments and the way that they are perceived by citizens. “