A System Dynamics Approach for Hospital Waste Management in a City in a Developing Country: The Case of Nablus, Palestine

Hospitals and health centers provide a variety of healthcare services and normally generate hazardous waste as well as general waste. General waste has a similar nature to that of municipal solid waste and therefore could be disposed of in municipal landfills. However, hazardous waste poses risks to public health, unless it is properly managed. The hospital waste management system encompasses many factors, i.e., number of beds, number of employees, level of service, population, birth rate, fertility rate, and not in my back yard (NIMBY) syndrome. Therefore, this management system requires a comprehensive analysis to determine the role of each factor and its influence on the whole system. In this research, a hospital waste management simulation model is presented based on the system dynamics technique to determine the interaction among these factors in the system using a software package, ithink. This model is used to estimate waste segregation as this is important in the hospital waste management system to minimize risk to public health. Real data has been obtained from a case study of the city of Nablus, Palestine to validate the model. The model exhibits wastes generated from three types of hospitals (private, charitable, and government) by considering the number of both inpatients and outpatients depending on the population of the city under study. The model also offers the facility to compare the total waste generated among these different types of hospitals and anticipate and predict the future generated waste both infectious and non-infectious and the treatment cost incurred

Apport des multifractals à l'études des longues series pluviométriques

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Chapitre 7 : longues séries : modèles et tendances = Chapter 7 : long series : models and trends

Extrait de documentNowadays, the major international organizations are very concerned with the climatic variability and prediction issue. The existence of long series constitutes a prerequisite for underscoring the transitional nature of climatic regime in different regions. All the papers collected in the current chapter 7 show that the FRIEND group's various databases can contribute towards meeting this prerequisite. A rational utilization of long series to confirm these hypotheses could give scientific hydrology the opportunity to contribute significantly to the understanding of the evolution of discontinuous climatic systems and to the worldwide common research effort.Le problème de la variabilité climatique et de la prédiction du climat est aujourd'hui au centre des préoccupations de toutes les grandes organisations internationales. La disponibilité des séries longues constituait un préalable incontournable pour la mise en évidence du caractère transitoire des régimes climatiques dans différentes régions. L'ensemble des communications rassemblées dans ce chapitre 7 montre que les différentes bases de données des groupes FRIEND peuvent contribuer à lever ce préalable. Une exploitation rationnelle des séries longues pour la vérification de ces hypothèses pourrait fournir l'occasion de contribution majeure de l'hydrologie scientifique à la compréhension de l'évolution des systèmes climatiques discontinus et à l'effort commun de recherches au niveau mondial

Riparian wetlands of the middle reach of the Seine river (France): historical development, investigation and present hydrologic functioning. A case study

International audienceAlong the middle reach of the Seine river, upstream from Paris, riparian wetlands that have been functioning for centuries, first as a result of a succession of sedimentological/hydrological processes and later of continuous management practices where the value of the wetlands has been acknowledged as well as their importance for the ecology. Here, we present the results of a multidisciplinary research programme focused on this system with emphasis on its present hydrological functioning and on the tools used to understand and quantify it. The major hydrological and geochemical processes that are active at present are reviewed, but past processes are also described as well as the potential long-term evolution of the system. This study uses several innovative tools to investigate the wetlands and analyse them in space: thermographic aerial survey and electromagnetic prospecting resulting in a map of clay-layer thickness. Concerning the wetland hydrology, water budgets, established at different time scales (several years, one year, a season) illustrate the exchanges between the watershed, the river and the wetland and water storage in the wetlands during flood events. The results show how the upstream reservoirs, built during the last 20 years, presently control the preservation and functioning of downstream riparian wetlands. Monitoring and modelling of the hydrological functioning of one wetland site have made it possible to identify and quantify exchanges between the wetland (especially in the unsaturated upper layer) and its environment. In situ measurements of denitrification rates in the wetland were used to make initial estimates of its nitrate-elimination capacity