Assessing the transition of municipal solid waste management using combined material flow analysis and life cycle assessment

Faced with the challenges to deal with increasingly growing and ever diversified municipal solid waste (MSW), a series of waste directives have been published by European Commission to divert MSW from landfills to more sustainable management options. The presented study assessed the transition of MSW man-agement in Nottingham, UK, since the enforcement of the EU Landfill Directive using a tool of combined materials flow analysis (MFA) and life cycle assess-ment (LCA). The results show that the MSW management system in Nottingham changed from a relatively simple landfill & energy from waste (EfW) mode to a complex, multi-technology mode. Improvements in waste reduction, material re-cycling, energy recovery, and landfill prevention have been made. As a positive result, the global warming potential (GWP) of the MSW management system re-duced from 1,076.0 kg CO2–eq./t of MSW in 2001/02 to 211.3 kg CO2–eq./t of MSW in 2016/17. Based on the results of MFA and LCA, recommendations on separating food waste and textile at source and updating treatment technologies are made for future improvement

The Arab world's contribution to solid waste literature: a bibliometric analysis

BACKGROUND: Environmental and health-related effects of solid waste material are considered worldwide problems. The aim of this study was to assess the volume and impact of Arab scientific output published in journals indexed in the Science Citation Index (SCI) on solid waste. METHODS: We included all the documents within the SCI whose topic was solid waste from all previous years up to 31 December 2012. In this bibliometric analysis we sought to evaluate research that originated from Arab countries in the field of solid waste, as well as its relative growth rate, collaborative measures, productivity at the institutional level, and the most prolific journals. RESULTS: A total of 382 (2.35 % of the overall global research output in the field of solid waste) documents were retrieved from the Arab countries. The annual number of documents published in the past three decades (1982–2012) indicated that research productivity demonstrated a noticeable rise during the last decade. The highest number of articles associated with solid waste was that of Egypt (22.8 %), followed by Tunisia (19.6), and Jordan (13.4 %). the total number of citations over the analysed years at the date of data collection was 4,097, with an average of 10.7 citations per document. The h-index of the citing articles was 31. Environmental science was the most researched topic, represented by 175 (45.8 %) articles. Waste Management was the top active journal. The study recognized 139 (36.4 %) documents from collaborations with 25 non-Arab countries. Arab authors mainly collaborated with countries in Europe (22.5 %), especially France, followed by countries in the Americas (9.4 %), especially the USA. The most productive institution was the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, with 6.3 % of total publications. CONCLUSIONS: Despite the expected increase in solid waste production from Arab world, research activity about solid waste is still low. Governments must invest more in solid waste research to avoid future unexpected problems. Finally, since solid waste is a multidisciplinary science, research teams in engineering, health, toxicology, environment, geology and others must be formulated to produce research in solid waste from different scientific aspects

Metrics for optimising the multi-dimensional value of resources recovered from waste in a circular economy: A critical review

© 2017 The Authors - Established assessment methods focusing on resource recovery from waste within a circular economy context consider few or even a single domain/s of value, i.e. environmental, economic, social and technical domains. This partial approach often delivers misleading messages for policy- and decision-makers. It fails to accurately represent systems complexity, and obscures impacts, trade-offs and problem shifting that resource recovery processes or systems intended to promote circular economy may cause. Here, we challenge such partial approaches by critically reviewing the existing suite of environmental, economic, social and technical metrics that have been regularly observed and used in waste management and resource recovery systems' assessment studies, upstream and downstream of the point where waste is generated. We assess the potential of those metrics to evaluate ‘complex value’ of materials, components and products, i.e., the holistic sum of their environmental, economic, social and technical benefits and impacts across the system. Findings suggest that the way resource recovery systems are assessed and evaluated require simplicity, yet must retain a suitable minimum level of detail across all domains of value, which is pivotal for enabling sound decision-making processes. Criteria for defining a suitable set of metrics for assessing resource recovery from waste require them to be simple, transparent and easy to measure, and be both system- and stakeholder-specific. Future developments must focus on providing a framework for the selection of metrics that accurately describe (or at least reliably proxy for) benefits and impacts across all domains of value, enabling effective and transparent analysis of resource recovery form waste in circular economy systems.We gratefully acknowledge support of the UK Natural Environ-ment Research Council (NERC) and the UK Economic and SocialResearch Council (ESRC) who funded this work in the context of‘Complex Value Optimisation for Resource Recovery’(CVORR)project (Grant No. NE/L014149/1)

Analisis y sistematizacion critica de la organizacion administrativa chilena desde 1990 a 2006

100 p.Esta memoria crítica el Sistema de Organización de la Administración Pública Chilena, analizando conceptos e Instituciones propias del Derecho Administrativo, además de ello sistematiza toda la Administración Pública Ministerio por Ministerio, Servicio por Servicio, concluyendo con la opinión de los jefes de Servicio Público, en torno a las funciones de sus Órganos en los últimos años y hacia el futuro. Además pretende conocer si este Sistema de Organización es o no óptimo en ello la primacía de la realidad nos muestra el actuar diario de los Servicios Públicos y la Sistematización nos sirve por el análisis de sus Leyes Orgánicas para sostener que los esfuerzos de los últimos 16 años han sido consistentes pero aún falta en la interiorización de conceptos por parte de los funcionarios y en el estudio de las facultades entregadas a los Servicio Públicos todo lo que afecta al proceso de descentralización alejando la Administración Pública de los ciudadanos