Hazardous Waste Sites

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.

Hazardous Waste Site Remediation is an outstanding textbook that reviews specific treatment processes, as well as pertinent basic concepts in organic geochemistry, material balance mass transfer, thermodynamics, and kinetics. Following a quantitative approach to source control, the text covers regulations, materials handling, engineering principles, soil vapor extraction, chemical extraction and soil washing, solidification and stabilization, and chemical destruction. It also explores topics in bioremediation, thermal processes, risk assessment, and waste minimization. A solutions manual is available.

The United States may not be able to make all hazardous-waste sites as clean as possible. Therefore, priorities must be set for the timing of waste site remediations. This book assesses several of the government's methods of ranking sites for remediation and compares the performance of three such models using input data developed from the same set of waste sites. Because inconsistent methods may be neither effective nor prudent, the book recommends that the government consider developing a unified national approach to setting priorities to replace the current multiple approaches.

This volume analyzes the politics of hazardous waste siting and explores promising new strategies for siting facilities. Existing approaches to waste siting facilities have almost entirely failed, across all industrialized countries, largely because of community or NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) opposition. This volume examines a new strategy, voluntary choice siting--a process requiring mutual decisions negotiated between facility developers and the host communities. This bottom-up approach preserves democratic rights, recognizes the importance of public perceptions, and addresses issues of equity. In this collection, an interdisciplinary group of experts probes recent examples of waste facilities siting in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Japan. Both the successes and the failures presented offer practical insights into the siting process. The book includes an introductory review of the literature on facility siting and the NIMBY phenomenon as well as instructive essays on the use of voluntary processes in facilities siting. This book will be of value to policymakers, industry, and environmental groups, as well as to those working in environmental studies and engineering, political science, public health, geography, planning, and business economics.

This valuable information and data for evaluating health effects from hazardous waste sites stems from the efforts of specialists representing leading research centers, hospitals, universities, government agencies and includes consultants' as well as corporate interpretations.