This research applies stochastic decision tree analytical techniques to a decision of the type a small community may face when choosing a solid waste disposal system from among several alternatives. Specifically targeted are those situations in which a community finds itself (1) lying at or near the boundary of a central planning area, (2) in a position to exercise one of several disposal options, and (3) has access to the data base on solid waste which has been systematically developed by a central planning agency. The options available may or may not be optimal in terms of total cost, either to the community or to adjacent communities which participate in centrally coordinated or jointly organized activities. The study suggests that stochastic simulation models, drawing upon a data base developed by central planning agencies in cases where local data are inadequate or not available, can be useful in evaluating disposal alternatives at the community level. Further, the decision tree can be usefully employed to communicate results of the analysis. Some important areas of further research on the small community disposal system selection problem are noted.

In 1995, the Palestinian Authority (PA) was established as an interim Palestinian government on shreds of land within the West Bank and Gaza. One of the new authority’s lesser-known administrative mandates is protection of the environment from pollution. Though the PA was to have a semblance of “self-rule,” the Oslo Accords that established the PA also stipulated that the latter seek Israeli approval when building most large-scale infrastructures—including those designed to manage waste. Meanwhile, emergent ideas about the environment defined it as a limitless expanse. The environment projected out from PA enclaves on thirty percent of the land in all directions—including into the air above and into the subterrain below. The Accords projected environmental responsibility into Israel proper as well as into areas it “shares” with Palestinians in the occupied territories. As a consequence, Palestinian waste infrastructures are objects of concern not only to the Palestinian communities they are designed to serve but also to the Israeli state, to Israeli settlements, to regional neighbors and to foreign donors in far-flung offices who are concerned with “environmental security.” This dissertation investigates a series of multimillion dollar PA projects aimed at protecting what came to be called the “shared” environment through management of Palestinian wastes. In doing so it analyzes the tension between the insistence, on the one hand, that the PA govern “its” population within strictly defined borders as part of a hierarchical system of nested sovereignties in which Israel’s is the superior form, and the imperative, on the other hand, that this territorially-defined, officially interim government perform care for the territory’s longterm ecological future. It tends to be taken for granted that Oslo produced a period of separation by enclosing the West Bank and Gaza and cleaving them off from Israel proper. Millions of West Bank Palestinians are no longer permitted to work in, travel through or even visit Jerusalem or Israel. Israel has prohibited Israeli citizens’ entry into PA areas of the West Bank. This allows PA areas to appear relatively autonomous—insofar as they are viewed as separate from Israel. But in a number of significant ways, Israel continues to control and to direct the daily experiences and future possibilities of West Bank Palestinians. Separation and control are thus equally accurate characterizations of Palestinians’ experiences post-Oslo. This dissertation contends that their particular combination in the post-Oslo period has allowed people living in the West Bank to experience PA governance as what, borrowing a term I heard there, I call a phantom state (shibih dowlah). Palestinians see the limits of PA autonomy vis-a-vis Israel and the PA’s many donors. The PA is specter-like: an appearance without stable material follow-through. People nevertheless treat the PA as a matter-of-fact, tangible part of their lives: as an address for appeal, requests and complaints, as a distinct entity upon which responsibility, blame and, very occasionally, even praise is bestowed. Studies of garbage at the turn of the twenty-first century show that modern waste has the capacity to destabilize and to undermine political systems because of the risks it is perceived to pose and because of the difficulty of keeping it stable and contained. Unlike water, oil and electricity, waste is an infrastructural substrate whose flows should move out from inhabited areas rather than into them. As mobile, abject matter that perpetually threatens the environment, it requires constant monitoring. It is managed at regional scales. In the Palestinian context, waste therefore reveals some of the spatial-geographical complexities that render the treatment of separation and control as an either/or dynamic impossible to sustain. It also reveals the ways in which believing both separation and control to be true for the people experiencing them in combination means living, working and planning within a logic of constant contradiction. Waste is not the only infrastructural substrate that reveals the Mobius strip of separation and connectedness of the post-Oslo period. But waste and its infrastructures are uniquely useful for showing the impossibility and the partialness of a politics of separation more broadly in an emergent era of environmental securitization. This dissertation thus analyzes an incommensurable tension in what Achille Mbembe has called a “late-modern colonial occupation” that operates in the style of older forms of indirect colonial rule. That tension renders governance of people and territory both difficult and incoherent. It produces environmental hazards while seeking to eliminate them. And it performs major political displacements among colonized and colonizers alike.

Zugl.: Regensburg, Universiẗat, Diss., 2007.

Every year, the United States produces at least 236 million metric tons of hazardous waste. Hazardous waste is defined as solid waste that can pose a substantial threat to human health and the environment when disposed of incorrectly. Some commonly used household products, when disposed of, become hazardous waste; historically, much of this household hazardous waste (HHW) has been disposed of into systems not designed to safely handle hazardous waste. One solution to this disposal problem is providing safe disposal systems for household hazardous waste in the community. The purpose of this study was to survey the population of Benton County, OR to assess the residents' HHW disposal practices, attitudes and beliefs about HHW as an environmental health risk, and preferences for a safe disposal system. Benton County residents' awareness of the current community program for recycling used household items was also investigated. This study indicated that incorrect disposal methods were used by the majority of subjects for almost all HHW surveyed, and that for nonautomotive HHW, landfilling was the most common means of disposal. The majority of subjects in this study disposed of used motor oil and lead-acid batteries by recycling these HHW. A permanent collection site for HHW disposal was the preferred disposal option for 62% of subjects, and 100% of those subjects choosing this option said they would drive up to 5 miles to use this facility. This study indicates that the largest number of subjects preferred the option of paying a user fee for HHW disposal as a means of funding a HHW disposal system. Three-fourths of the subjects reported a high or moderate amount of concern about the contribution of HHW to pollution of surface and groundwater, and 68% of the subjects stated that they lacked confidence in the landfill to safely contain chemical wastes. Approximately one-half of the subjects recalled reading or hearing about HHW disposal in the past year, and 62% of the subjects stated that they would call their garbage disposal company for HHW disposal information. The results of this study indicate that 90% of the Benton County residents surveyed were aware of their curbside recycling program. This study suggests that Benton County residents are concerned about the possible adverse environmental health effects of incorrect HHW disposal, and supports a permanent collection site for the safe disposal of HHW, as well as increased public education, as means of reducing the risks to human health and the environment caused by incorrect HHW disposal. / Graduation date: 1992

This study aims to demonstrate the critical role of waste management in urban sustainability, promote planners' contribution to proactive and efficient waste management, and facilitate the integration of waste management into mainstream sustainability planning. With anticipated increases in population and associated waste generation, timely and effective waste management highlights one of the most critical challenges of sustainable development, which calls for meeting "the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (WCED, 1987). Waste management in urban areas plays a particularly important role, given that waste generated from urban areas are often exported out of the region for processing and treatment, and the impacts of waste disposal activities may pass on to the other jurisdictions, and even to the next generations. An urban system cannot be sustainable if it requires more resources than it can produce on its own and generates more wastes than the environment can assimilate. The current waste management practice, which focuses on short-term impacts and end-of-pipe solutions, is reactive in nature and inadequate to promote sustainability within urban systems, across jurisdictions, and across generations. Through material flows in and out of urban systems, many potential opportunities exist to reduce waste generation and to minimize the negative impacts on the environment, the economy, and the society. City planners' involvement in waste management, however, has been largely limited to siting waste management facilities. Linking waste management with three important lenses in planning-land use, economic development, and environmental planning, this study investigates the impacts of urban growth on waste management activities, the need of transforming the reactive nature of current waste management, and the challenges and opportunities that planners should address to promote urban systems' self-reliance of material and waste management needs. This study includes three empirical analyses to complement theoretical discussions. First, it connects waste statistics with demographic data, geographic characteristics, and policy instruments at the county level to examine whether waste volume can be decoupled from urban population growth. Second, it examines the life cycle costs of different waste management options and develops a simulation study to seek cost-effective strategies for long-term waste management. Third, it compiles evidence of geographic-specific characteristics related to waste management and demonstrates why waste management policies cannot be one-size-fit-all. This study finds that, with successful implementation of strategic policy design, waste generation and its associated impacts can be decoupled from population and urban growth. Good lessons about waste reduction programs can be learned from different communities. Meanwhile, this study also reveals various challenges facing communities with heterogeneous characteristics, such as housing density, building age, and income. Accordingly, this study discusses the potential opportunities for planners to contribute to community-specific waste management programs, the prospect of transforming waste management practice from a cost burden to a long-term economic development strategy, and the need to incorporate waste management into the sustainable urban planning agenda.

published_or_final_version / Environmental Management / Master / Master of Science in Environmental Management

published_or_final_version / Housing Management / Master / Master of Housing Management

This dissertation is an examination of the formation processes operating at nineteenth-century housesites in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The approach stresses the reconstruction in behavioral terms of all urban deposits, including those considered "mixed" or "disturbed." The data base for the dissertation consists of three disparate archaeological collections at the Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth. The analysis was performed under a unifying research agenda and with a consistent set of analytic techniques in a kind of "postexcavation salvage." These methods include developing a Harris matrix to reconstruct site stratification, plotting deposition locations in reference to known activity areas (such as doors and windows), measuring relative sherd size, and calculating a minimum number of vessels through the examination of ware, form, and surface decoration and the refitting of sherds. This latter exercise of crossmending helped to establish the horizontal and vertical displacement of sherds. Measures of diversity included counting the number of artifact classes to determine richness and developing a prevalence index to assess evenness; i.e., the distribution of artifact types within a deposit. The behavioral unit of analysis was the household, as it was hypothesized that individual households generated refuse in patterned ways. Nineteenth-century households from three sites were reconstructed from historical sources such as city directories, census information, family genealogies, and tax assessment records. Twelve households occupying three different housesites were linked with various refuse deposits and compared over time and space. Several patterns of trash-disposal behaviors recurred at the three sites. Preferred modes of refuse discard included the use of open-air middens, privies, and opportunistic middens. Households apparently also transformed or redeposited secondary-refuse aggregates to create tertiary deposits. Often characterized as mixed or disturbed, these tertiary deposits can be informative about depositional behaviors in the urban context. Conclusions summarize how immigrant status, stage in household development, tenancy, and owner occupation affect the discard behaviors at the three sites. Once a "grammar of garbage" is reconstructed in behavioral terms, more abstract constructs, such as the worldview of hygiene and sanitation, can be suggested.

abstract / toc / Environmental Management / Master / Master of Science in Environmental Management

A significant segment of the urban population in many low-income countries derives their living from the harvest of marketable materials from urban waste streams. The activities of so-called "scavengers" or waste pickers in many African, Asian, and Latin American cities have also come to be understood to have environmental benefits: the diversion of materials from the urban waste stream decreases the volume of wastes that need to be collected, transported and disposed of. However, due to their daily contact with garbage, these men, women, and children are usually associated with dirt, disease, and squalor. The work of the scavenger is often conceptualized as being poverty driven and undertaken as a survival strategy or coping mechanism in a harsh urban environment. In recent years, various programs and projects have been developed by nongovernmental organizations, religious institutions, community-based organizations, and local governments to address the needs of scavengers. Such intervention schemes are designed in one way or another to alter the scavengers' existing situations. This study looks at the possible linkages between the evolving understanding of scavenging and the various approaches to intervention that it engenders. This study first examines how scholars and researchers analyze waste picking issues and their suggestions for potential interventions and then relates this understanding to how institutions, citizens, non-governmental organizations, and aid agencies are addressing these issues in practice. It is found that different conceptualizations of waste picking issues have led to different intervention prescriptions, and that the prescribed interventions are motivated by environmental, economic, or humanitarian concerns. This study contends that the recommended and implemented intervention prescriptions are simply promoting market means in an attempt to achieve humanitarian ends, and, therefore, are only short-term measures that will not solve the identified waste picking issues. Data sources used in this effort include academic journals, conference papers, case studies of development programs, newspaper articles, Web sites, and field reports. Data were also obtained by contacting researchers and organizations that have studied or are currently working with waste pickers in a variety of geographical settings.