Changes in Valued "Capacities" of Soils and Sediments as Indicators of Nonlinear and Time-Delayed Environmental Effects

This paper discusses the buffering, oxygen-donating, and sorption capacities of soils and sediments as an inter-connected system for regulating the retention and release of chemical pollutants. In this context, the author discusses the chemical conditions under which sediments may serve as a source or a sink for toxic materials, and conditions under which soils may retain or release them. It is demonstrated that nonlinear, time-delayed ecological transformations in soils and sediments often can be understood in terms of the interlinked system. The author discusses some possible future long-term environmental problems that might beset Europe, and some implications for a monitoring strategy for foreseeing such problems. Because the release of adsorbed toxic chemicals from heavily polluted sediments and soils can occur suddenly owing to changes in oxygen status (i.e., redox potential) or acidity, strategies for preventing the long-term release of such materials should not only consider current conditions of pH and redox potential, but also, how those conditions might change in the future

Chemical Time Bombs: Definition, Concepts, and Examples

This report discusses the question of the potential long-term impacts of the accumulation and mobilization of toxic and environmentally harmful chemicals in the environment. This paper deals with the potential problems caused by long-term accumulations of chemicals in the environment, cites examples of economic costs of such occurrences, and defines the means by which, under certain circumstances, such accumulations behave as "time bombs". The report gives examples of such behavior and discusses how chemical time bombs may be predicted

Industrial Metabolism and River Basin Studies: A New Approach for the Analysis of Chemical Pollution

The object of this report is to demonstrate the merit of studies in industrial metabolism as a new analytical tool for assessing the sources and flows of toxic chemicals. The methodology provides a framework for "cradle-to-grave" analysis that traces the movement of chemicals through the industrial economy, identifies the entry points through which they pass from the economy to the environment, and assesses their impact once they have entered the environment. The analysis is guided throughout by the simple constraint imposed by the principle of mass balance, which requires that the sum total of a chemical remains constant as it moves through a system from production to consumption to disposal, even as the partitioning of the chemical into various economic streams changes. Much of the analysis in this report is focused on the Rhine River Basin. The authors suggest that the spatial unit of large river basins may be ideal for studies in industrial metabolism. By definition, a river basin encompasses the land area that drains into the rivers or its tributaries. Thus, if one accounts for movements of materials into or out of the basin (particularly via atmospheric transport), it may be assumed that emissions generated within the basin can be lost from the basin only by river transport and discharge at its mouth. The remainder of the emissions (equal to total emissions minus the output from the basin) is deposited in and spatially bound by the basin, accumulating in chemical sinks, including agricultural soils, ground waters, sediments of lakes and tributaries, and landfills and toxic waste dumps. Mass balance analysis ensures that these sinks are accounted for and provides boundary conditions for assessing cumulative loads. Moreover, the tracing of chemical flows, both in the economy and environment occurs within the same spatial domain, and linkages between sources and their environmental effects are more easily established

Designing new customer experiences: a study of socio-material practices in service design

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How nascent occupations construct a mandate: the case of service designers' ethos

In this paper, we study the way that nascent occupations constructing an occupational mandate invoke not only skills and expertise or a new technology to distinguish themselves from other occupations, but also their values. We studied service design, an emerging occupation whose practitioners aim to understand customers and help organizations develop new or improved services and customer experiences, translate those into feasible solutions, and implement them. Practitioners enacted their values in their daily work activities through a set of material practices, such as shadowing customers or front-line staff, conducting interviews in the service context, or creating “journey maps” of a service user’s experience. The role of values in the construction of an occupational mandate is particularly salient for occupations such as service design, which cannot solely rely on skills and technical expertise as sources of differentiation. We show how service designers differentiated themselves from other competing occupations by highlighting how their values make their work practices unique. Both values and work practices, what service designers call their ethos, were essential to enable service designers to define the proper conduct and modes of thinking characteristic of their occupational mandate

Aqueous Emission Factors for the Industrial Discharges of Cadmium in the Rhine River Basin in the Period 1970-1990: An Inventory

This report contains an overview of the development of aqueous point source emission factors for cadmium in the Rhine River basin in the period 1970-1988. Based on these emission factors the aqueous emissions of cadmium for different industrial activities in the basin are calculated. For some activities defining emission factors does not make sense, since their cadmium emission is determined by e.g. ore or scrap purchase policy and not by the applied process technology. The overall cadmium emission to the Rhine and to its tributaries is compared with the point source component of in-basin cadmium monitoring data. The results show reasonable agreement. Further study is required to include hydrological characteristics in a tributary-Rhine model, in order to justify the comparison of monitoring data and emission estimates. In the table below, a summary of all the calculated point source emissions in time and per branch is given. A second table provides an overview of the development of emission factors for point source emissions in the Rhine River basin in time

Emission Factors for Aqueous Industrial Cadmium Discharges to the Rhine Basin. A Historical Reconstruction of the Period 1970-1988

The report, by reviewing the relevant literature and synthesizing data on economic technologies, trade, and environmental monitoring, provides an analysis of the aqueous emissions of cadmium from industrial point sources in the Rhine Basin from 1970-1988. The report not only provides valuable input to our study of the Basin, but also demonstrates a methodology by which historical reconstructions of aqueous pollution can be attained and utilized in assessing long-term environmental trends. This historical Rhine Basin study provides a much needed database for further understanding of the institutional, political, and social factors that shaped the pollution landscape in previous decades and led to the remarkable cleanup that has occurred more recently. Such information is urgently needed for guiding policies, particularly in the newly industrialized regions of the world, such as southeast China, and in highly polluted river basins, such as in Eastern Europe