Waste And Discards In The Asia Pacific Region

This book uncovers, explores and analyses the cultural and social factors and values that lie behind waste making, recycling and disposal in the Asia Pacific region, where impressive economic growth has led to significant increases in production, consumption and concomitant waste production. This volume demonstrates the immense scope of waste as a multi-sectoral phenomenon, covering discussions on food, menstrual products, sewage, electronics, scrap, nuclear waste, plastics, and even entire villages as they are submerged underwater by dam building, considered expendable in favour of economic growth. It discusses the wide range of approaches and contexts through which people interact with waste, including socio-economic analysis, participatory observation, laboratory science, art, video, installations, literature and photography. Case studies focusing on India, China and Japan, in addition to other regional examples, demonstrate the ubiquity of waste, materially and geographically. It examines the duality of waste management, fostering community building while simultaneously excluding marginalised groups; how it can be linked to efforts creating circular economies, to then reappear in oceanic garbage patches; or technical waste repurposed for high-tech laboratory research before being discarded once again. This timely and wide-ranging collection of essays will be an important read for scholars, researchers and students in sustainability, development studies, discard studies, and social and cultural history, particularly focusing on countries in the Asia-Pacific.

"This book uncovers, explores and analyses the cultural and social factors and values that lie behind waste making, recycling and disposal in the Asia Pacific region, where impressive economic growth has led to significant increases in production, consumption and concomitant waste production. This volume demonstrates the immense scope of waste as a multi-sectoral phenomenon, covering discussions on food, menstrual products, sewage, electronics, scrap, nuclear waste, plastics, and even entire villages as they are submerged underwater by dam building, considered expendable in favour of economic growth. It discusses the wide range of approaches and contexts through which people interact with waste, including socio-economic analysis, participatory observation, laboratory science, art, video, installations, literature and photography. Case studies focusing on India, China and Japan, in addition to other regional examples, demonstrate the ubiquity of waste, materially and geographically. It examines the duality of waste management, fostering community building while simultaneously excluding marginalised groups; how it can be linked to efforts creating circular economies, to then reappear in oceanic garbage patches; or technical waste repurposed for high-tech laboratory research before being discarded once again. This timely and wide-ranging collection of essays will be an important read for scholars, researchers and students in sustainability, development studies, discard studies, and social and cultural history, particularly focusing on countries in the Asia-Pacific"--

Several decades ago, the efforts of public administrations were concentrated on developing fisheries and aquaculture and ensuring growth in production and consumption. Then, in the 1980s, as many resources became fully or overexploited, the attention of policy-makers began to focus instead on fisheries management, in addition to development of aquaculture. Subsequent recognition of the many failures in management have now led FAO member countries and other relevant stakeholders to broaden the approach and governance, that is, the sum of the legal, social, economic and political arrangements used to manage fisheries and aquaculture in a sustainable manner is currently seen as a necessary context for management and is becoming the main concern. Aquaculture continues to expand, while marine capture fisheries - when summed together worldwide - seem to have reached a ceiling. Reflecting the growing importance of aquaculture, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture ends with a discussion of the challenges that aquaculture is facing as well as of the opportunities that are open to the sector. The discussion is based on a prospective analysis of the aquaculture sector worldwide, which was undertaken by FAO in the past two years. [Includes the fourth edition of the FAO World Fisheries and Aquaculture Atlas CD-ROM, a comprehensive and global view of marine and inland caputre fisheries and aquaculture (available in English)]

Solid waste management issues, technologies and challenges are dynamic. More so, in developing and transitory nations in Asia. This book, written by Asian experts in solid waste management, explores the current situation in Asian countries including Pacific Islands. There are not many technical books of this kind, especially dedicated to this region of the world. The chapters form a comprehensive, coherent investigation in municipal solid waste (MSW) management, including, definitions used, generation, sustainable waste management system, legal framework and impacts on global warming. Several case studies from Asian nations are included to exemplify the real situation experienced. Discussions on MSW policy in these countries and their impacts on waste management and minimization (if any) are indeed an eye-opener. Undoubtedly, this book would be a pioneer in revealing the latest situation in the Asian region, which includes two of the world’s most dynamic nations in the economic growth. It is greatly envisaged to form an excellent source of reference in MSW management in Asia and Pacific Islands. This book will bridge the wide gap in available information between the developed and transitory/developing nations.

This book explores Critical Sustainability Sciences, a new field of scientific inquiry into sustainability issues. It builds on a highly novel integration of elements from relational ontologies, critical theory, political ecology, and intercultural philosophy in support of emancipatory perspectives on sustainability and development. The book begins by uncovering the weaknesses of mainstream sustainability science and debates on sustainable development. The new field of Critical Sustainability Sciences has grown out of a deep engagement with relational ontologies, which helps to overcome the dualist ontology underlying mainstream notions of sustainability and development. Dualist ontologies reinforce problematic anthropocentric divisions, for example, between humans and nature, subjects and objects, mind and matter, body and soul, etc. Examples from indigenous peoples in Bolivia, India, and Ghana – as well as integrative movements in Chile, Brazil, and Europe – show that relational conceptions of life, rooted in ecosophy and cosmosophy, can provide an intercultural philosophical foundation for Critical Sustainability Sciences. The book concludes by describing three key topics for exploration in Critical Sustainability Sciences: societal reorganization in view of emancipatory, existential, and cognitive self-determination; living labor and commons; and the development of new comprehensive relational scientific paradigms. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners of emancipatory and intercultural approaches to sustainability and development.

Plastic pollution is one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century that requires innovative and varied solutions. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, this book brings together interdisciplinary, multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder perspectives exploring challenges and opportunities for utilising digital innovations to manage and accelerate the transition to a circular plastic economy (CPE). This book is organised into three sections bringing together discussion of environmental conditions, operational dimensions and country case studies of digital transformation towards the circular plastic economy. It explores the environment for digitisation in the circular economy, bringing together perspectives from practitioners in academia, innovation, policy, civil society and government agencies. The book also highlights specific country case studies in relation to the development and implementation of different innovative ideas to drive the circular plastic economy across the three sub-Saharan African regions. Finally, the book interrogates the policy dimensions and practitioner perspectives towards a digitally enabled circular plastic economy. Written for a wide range of readers across academia, policy and practice, including researchers, students, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), digital entrepreneurs, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and multilateral agencies, policymakers and public officials, this book offers unique insights into complex, multilayered issues relating to the production and management of plastic waste and highlights how digital innovations can drive the transition to the circular plastic economy in Africa. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This book addresses the gap in the existing literature on the governance of transdisciplinary research partnerships in transformational sustainability research by exploring the governance of knowledge co-production in coupled socio-ecological system dynamics. Multiple social and ecological crises raise new cross-sectoral research questions that call for an evolution in contemporary science in the direction of society-wide knowledge co-production on sustainability transformations of interdependent social and ecological systems. This book proposes a new approach to this based on enabling capacities for collaboration among scientific researchers and societal actors with diverse values, perspectives, and research interests. By drawing upon the thriving literature on the conditions for community and multistakeholder-driven collective action, the analysis sheds new light on the governance arrangements for organizing so-called transdisciplinary research partnerships for sustainability. This book identifies robust conditions that lead to effective collaborative research with societal actors and digs deeper into capacity building for partnership research through fostering social learning on sustainability values among research partners and organizing training and knowledge exchange at institutions of higher education. The book proposes solutions for addressing collective action challenges in transdisciplinary partnerships in an accessible and broadly interdisciplinary manner to a large audience of sustainability scholars and practitioners. It will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of sustainable development, social ecological transitions, and science policy, while also being a useful resource for engineers, QSE managers, and policymakers.

Cooperation and Engagement in the Asia-Pacific Region provides valuable insight into a region that encompasses many important maritime regions, and harbors promising opportunities for maritime cooperation and engagement.