Plastic bags, newspapers, pizza boxes, razors, watches, diapers, toothbrushes … What makes a thing disposable? Which of its properties allows us to treat it as if it did not matter, or as if it ...actually lacked matter? Why do so many objects appear to us as nothing more than brief flashes between checkout-line and landfill? In An Ontology of Trash, Greg Kennedy inquires into the meaning of disposable objects and explores the nature of our prodigious refuse. He takes trash as a real ontological problem resulting from our unsettled relation to nature. The metaphysical drive from immanence to transcendence leaves us in an alien world of objects drained of meaningful physical presence. Consequently, they become interpreted as beings that somehow essentially lack being, and exist in our technological world only to disappear. Kennedy explores this problematic nature and looks for possibilities of salutary change.
The Chinese government has launched the Rural Living Environment Improvement Initiative (RLEII) to solve the poor living conditions in rural areas. The initiative enhances rural greenery; provides ...sanitary toilets; and promotes proper disposal of animal manure, sewage, and household waste in rural areas. We collected data using in-person interviews with 938 rural residents in Xinjiang, China, to elicit their preference, preference intensity, and preference heterogeneity for RLEII. Results indicated that rural residents prefer to see shortcomings of the RLEII addressed. Rural greening construction is identified with the highest preference intensity. We also find significant heterogeneity in rural residents' preferences for each attribute of RLEII. The preference heterogeneity is rooted in the region's economic condition (poor vs. nonpoor region). It is essential to understand rural residents' choice for rural public goods supply and to respect their preference intensity, sequence, and heterogeneity for RLEII to enhance the implementation performance. We discuss the implications of these findings.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
3.
The Business of Waste Stokes, Raymond G.; Köster, Roman; Sambrook, Stephen C.
09/2013
eBook
The advent of consumer societies in the United Kingdom and West Germany after 1945 led to the mass 'production' of garbage. This book compares the social, cultural and economic fallout of the growing ...volume and changing composition of waste in the two countries from 1945 to the present through sustained attention to changes in the business of handling household waste. Though the UK and Germany are similar in population density, degrees of urbanisation, and standardisation, the two countries took profoundly different paths from low-waste to throwaway societies, and more recently, towards the goal of 'zero-waste'. The authors explore evolving balances between public and private provision in waste services; the transformation of public cleansing into waste management; the role of government legislation and regulation; emerging conceptualisations of recycling and resource recovery; and the gradual shift of the industry's regulatory and business context from local to national and then to international.
The mass arrival of pelagic sargassum is an international issue that is currently taking its toll on the economic activity of affected regions by causing a significant reduction in investment and ...tourism. The purpose of this work was to evaluate the Logistic Modified and Gompertz Modified sigmoid kinetic models for describing the lag phase in the generation of biomethane. The case studies were: anaerobic co-digestion (ACoD) of Sargassum spp./domestic organic waste and Sargassum spp. in mono-digestion. The experimental method, based on biochemical methane potential (BMP), enabled kinetic models to be built for methane production under environmental conditions and an estimate to be made for the duration of the lag phase. The maximum cumulative production determined for monodigestion was 140.7 cmsup.3 of CHsub.4/g SV at 99 days, and for ACoD, it was 161.3 cmsup.3 of CHsub.4/g SV at 172 days. The lag phase was determined to be approximately 7 days and 93 days, respectively. It was concluded that the modified sigmoid growth functions are a valuable tool for studying the start-up and scaling of systems for the ACoD of organic waste. The results present the ACoD of coastal pelagic sargassum algae and domestic organic waste as a potential alternative energy source.
This volume focuses on those waste objects that most fundamentally shape our lives and also attempts to understand our complicated emotional and intellectual relationships to our own refuse: nuclear ...waste, climate debris, pop-culture rubbish, digital detritus, and more.
The illegal burning of solid waste in residential stoves is an existing practice, but until now it has been completely disregarded as an emission source of atmospheric pollutants in many developed ...countries, including those in eastern Europe. Various types of solid waste (plastics, treated wood, plyboards, tyre, rag) serve as an auxiliary fuel in many households, in particular during the heating season. In this work, for the first time ever in atmospheric pollution studies, specific tracer compounds identified previously in controlled test burnings of different waste types in the laboratory were detected and quantified in ambient PM.sub.10 samples collected in five Hungarian and four Romanian settlements. Using the identified tracers and their experimentally determined relative emission factors, the potential contribution of illegal waste burning emissions to ambient PM.sub.10 mass concentrations was assessed. Our findings implied that the burning of polyethylene terephthalate (PET)-containing waste (food and beverage packaging, clothes) was predominant at all the locations, especially in north-eastern Hungary and Romania. There is substantial evidence that the burning of scrap furniture is also common in big cities in Hungary and Romania. Back-of-the-envelope calculations based on the relative emission factors of individual tracers suggested that the contribution of solid waste burning particulate emissions to ambient PM.sub.10 mass concentrations may be as high as a few percent. This finding, when considering the extreme health hazards associated with particulate emissions from waste burning, is a matter of serious public health concern.
Zsuzsa Gille combines social history, cultural analysis, and
environmental sociology to advance a long overdue social theory of waste in this
study of waste management, Hungarian state socialism, and ...post--Cold War capitalism.
From 1948 to the end of the Soviet period, Hungary developed a cult of waste that
valued reuse and recycling. With privatization the old environmentally beneficial,
though not flawless, waste regime was eliminated, and dumping and waste incineration
were again promoted. Gille's analysis focuses on the struggle between a
Budapest-based chemical company and the small rural village that became its toxic
dump site.
