Waste Substrate Designing The Informal Waste Landscape

This thesis explores the role of landscape architecture in spatializing the dematerialization and contamination of informal waste landscapes that have emerged in Accra due to global consumption. As a design response, it speculates how waste and excess can become a driver in creating an alternative future that fosters new social, ecological, and economic interactions while addressing the complexities and challenges that have arisen due to these landscapes.Waste and excess give rise to new landscapes. To confront them, we can restructure our preconceptions and negative connotations of these wastelands and its associated actors that have been rendered invisible and excluded. The proposed design critiques the binary of the contaminated landscape and remediated landscape and alternatively seeks to find a co-existence of the two by drawing out the potential reciprocity between them. As a result, a tension is created between the aesthetics of remediation and containment. There is both beauty and ugliness in the process of regeneration and decomposition.

Publisher Description

"For thousands of years humans have experimented with various methods of waste disposal-from burning and burying to simply packing up and moving in search of an unscathed environment. Habits of disposal are deeply ingrained in our daily lives, so casual and continual that we rarely ever stop to ponder the big-picture effects on social, spatial and ecological orders. Rethinking the ways in which we produce, collect, discard and reuse our waste, whether it's materials, spaces or places, is essential to ensure a more feasible future. Waste Matters: Adaptive Reuse for Productive Landscapes presents a series of historical and contemporary design ideas that reimagine a range of repurposed materials at diverse scales and in various contexts by exploring methods of hacking, disassembly, reassembly, recycling, adaptive reuse and preservation of the built environment. Waste Matters will inspire designers to sample and rearrange bits of artifacts from the past and present to produce culturally relevant and ecologically sensitive materials, objects, architecture and environments"--

This Guide has been developed particularly for solid waste management practitioners, such as local government officials, facility owners and operators, consultants, and regulatory agency specialists. Contains technical and economic information to help these practitioners meet the daily challenges of planning, managing, and operating municipal solid waste (MSW) programs and facilities. The Guide's primary goals are to encourage reduction of waste at the source and to foster implementation of integrated solid waste management systems that are cost-effective and protect human health and the environment. Illustrated.

Life is often considered to be a journey. The lifecycle of waste can similarly be considered to be a journey from the cradle (when an item becomes valueless and, usually, is placed in the dustbin) to the grave (when value is restored by creating usable material or energy; or the waste is transformed into emissions to water or air, or into inert material placed in a landfill). This preface provides a route map for the journey the reader of this book will undertake. Who? Who are the intended readers of this book? Waste managers (whether in public service or private companies) will find a holistic approach for improving the environmental quality and the economic cost of managing waste. The book contains general principles based on cutting edge experience being developed across Europe. Detailed data and a computer model will enable operations managers to develop data-based improvements to their systems. Producers oj waste will be better able to understand how their actions can influence the operation of environmentally improved waste management systems. Designers oj products and packages will be better able to understand how their design criteria can improve the compatibility of their product or package with developing, environmentally improved waste management systems. Waste data specialists (whether in laboratories, consultancies or environ mental managers of waste facilities) will see how the scope, quantity and quality of their data can be improved to help their colleagues design more effective waste management systems.

Organic waste composting is another excellent example to demonstrate the power and the benefits of nexus thinking. Even though organic waste composting itself is not a new topic, those who want to start a new project or align an ongoing project with nexus thinking, find it difficult to gather the necessary information. With nine case studies from four continents, this book aims to fill above gap in literature. While current literature on composting is often found to be limited to either soil/agriculture sector or waste management sector, this book presents a combined point of view. This open access book starts with an introductory chapter that describes the need to bring the waste management aspects and soil nutrient management aspects of compost production into one integrated theme. The relevance of nexus thinking and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are also presented in this introduction. The first three chapters after the introduction covers composting from the solid waste management and its policy aspects, taking examples from three developing countries. The next three examples are mostly about the benefits composting can provide to the soil and agriculture. These examples are also from three developing countries, but with a mixture of urban as well as rural settings. Last three chapters present more insight into the latest developments taking examples from Europe, as well as new methods adapted from the traditional styles from Africa.

The book points out that rural regions need proper attention at the global level concerning solid waste management sector where bad practices and public health threats could be avoided through traditional and integrated waste management routes. Solid waste management in rural areas is a key issue in developing and transitioning countries due to the lack of proper waste management facilities and services. The book further examines, on the one hand, the main challenges in the development of reliable waste management practices across rural regions and, on the other hand, the concrete solutions and the new opportunities across the world in dealing with municipal and agricultural wastes. The book provides useful information for academics, various professionals, the members of civil society, and national and local authorities.

Humans generate millions of tons of waste every day. This waste is rich in water, nutrients, energy and organic compounds. Yet waste is not being managed in a way that permits us to derive value from its reuse, whilst millions of farmers struggle with depleted soils and lack of water. This book shows how Resource Recovery and Reuse (RRR) could create livelihoods, enhance food security, support green economies, reduce waste and contribute to cost recovery in the sanitation chain. While many RRR projects fully depend on subsidies and hardly survive their pilot phase, hopeful signs of viable approaches to RRR are emerging around the globe including low- and middle-income countries. These enterprises or projects are tapping into entrepreneurial initiatives and public ̶ private partnerships, leveraging private capital to help realize commercial or social value, shifting the focus from treatment for waste disposal to treatment of waste as a valuable resource for safe reuse. The book provides a compendium of business options for energy, nutrients and water recovery via 24 innovative business models based on an in-depth analysis of over 60 empirical cases, of which 47 from around the world are described and evaluated in a systematic way. The focus is on organic municipal, agro-industrial and food waste, including fecal sludge, supporting a diverse range of business models with potential for large-scale out-and up-scaling.