The Economics of Residential Solid Waste Management

This paper provides a broad overview of recent trends in solid waste and recycling, related public policy issues, and the economics literature devoted to these topics. Public attention to solid waste and recycling has increased dramatically over the past decade both in the United States and in Europe. In response, economists have developed models to help policy makers choose the efficient mix of policy levers to regulate solid waste and recycling activities. Economists have also employed different kinds of data to estimate the factors that contribute to the generation of residential solid waste and recycling and to estimate the effectiveness of many of the policy options employed.

Garbage collection can be made real-time and verifiable

An efficient means of memory reclamation (also known as Garbage Collection) is essential for Machine Intelligence applications where dynamic storage allocation is desired or required. Solutions for real-time systems must introduce very small processing overhead and must also provide for the verification of the software in order to meet the application time budgets and to verify the correctness of the software. Garbage Collection (GC) techniques are proposed for symbolic processing systems which may simultaneously meet both real-time requirements and verification requirements. The proposed memory reclamation technique takes advantage of the strong points of both the earlier Mark and Sweep technique and the more recent Copy Collection approaches. At least one practical implementation of these new GC techniques has already been developed and tested on a very-high performance symbolic computing system. Complete GC processing of all generated garbage has been demonstrated to require as little as a few milliseconds to perform. This speed enables the effective operation of the GC function as either a background task or as an actual part of the application task itself

URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

As cities in the developing world grow, their poor residents are being deprived of services, especially water, sewer, and solid waste collection, that can only be purchased expensively in private markets. But the inadequate provision of urban environmental services is not inevitable. A lack of will in this respect is partly due to an ambivalent attitude toward city growth and a widespread feeling that rural-urban migration is excessive. Provision of optimal urban environmental services is also expensive. While the budget problems are exacerbated by foolish pricing policies and cost inefficiencies, it may not be feasible for developing countries to provide all urban residents with optimal service levels. There are many ways to provide basic services to poor residents.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,