Resisting Garbage presents a new approach to understanding practices of waste removal and recycling in American cities, one that is grounded in the close observation of case studies while being broadly applicable to many American cities today. Most current waste practices in the United States, Lily Baum Pollans argues, prioritize sanitation and efficiency while allowing limited post-consumer recycling as a way to quell consumers’ environmental anxiety. After setting out the contours of this “weak recycling waste regime,” Pollans zooms in on the very different waste management stories of Seattle and Boston over the last forty years. While Boston’s local politics resulted in a waste-export program with minimal recycling, Seattle created new frameworks for thinking about consumption, disposal, and the roles that local governments and ordinary people can play as partners in a project of resource stewardship. By exploring how these two approaches have played out at the national level, Resisting Garbage provides new avenues for evaluating municipal action and fostering practices that will create environmentally meaningful change.

This book offers a critical perspective on the issue of organising waste in cities, which has often been positioned in terms of relatively narrow engineering, economic and physical science approaches. It emphasises the ways in which the notion of waste, and the narratives and discourses associated with it, have been socially constructed with corresponding implications for waste governance and local waste handling practices. Organising waste in the city takes a broad and international approach to the ways in which the issue of waste is framed, and brings together narratives from cities as diverse as Amsterdam, Bristol, Cairo, Gothenburg, Helsingborg and Managua. Organised into four main sections and with an integrative introduction and conclusion, the book not only provides new insights into the hidden stories of urban and municipal household solid waste and waste landscapes, but also connects concerns regarding urban waste to such issues as globalisation, governance, urban ecology, and social, economic and environmental justice.

"In a rapidly urbanizing global society, solid waste management will be a key challenge facing all the world's cities. This publication provides a fresh perspective and new data on one of the biggest issues in urban development.

The affluence of western society has given rise to unprecedented quantities of waste, presenting one of the most intractable environmental problems for contemporary society. This book examines recycling and municipal waste management in three major cities: London, New York and Hamburg. A range of political and economic issues are examined to illustrate how any reduction in the size of the waste stream in order to achieve more equitable and environmentally sustainable patterns of resource use is incompatible with the current emphasis in the use of the market for environmental protection. The case studies show how, contrary to the hopes of many environmentalists and policy makers, municipal waste management is moving steadily towards the profitable option of incineration with energy recovery, rather than the recycling of materials or waste reduction at source. The evidence suggests that the achievement of a more sustainable pattern of recycling and waste management policy would demand a fundamental change in public policy, to give government a more active role in environmental protection.

In our rapidly urbanizing global society, solid waste management will be a key challenge facing all the world's cities. This title provides a fresh perspective and data on one of the biggest issues in urban development.

Uncontrolled spreading of waste materials leads to health problems and environmental damage. To prevent these problems a waste management infrastructure has been set to collect and dispose of the waste, based on a hierarchy of three principles: waste prevention, recycling/reuse, and final disposal. Final disposal is the least desirable as it causes massive emissions, to the atmosphere, water bodies and the subsoil. The emission of methane to the atmosphere is an important source of greenhouse gasses. Organic waste therefore gets a lot of attention in waste management, which for Europe can be illustrated by the issue of the Landfill Directive (99/31/EC) and the Sewage Sludge Directive (86/278/EEC). Proper treatment of organic waste may however turn this burden into an asset. In particular, biological treatment may help in developing more effective resource management and sustainable development. The following advantages may be listed: The greenhouse effect is tackled as methane emissions from landfilling are prevented Soil quality can be restored or enhanced by the use of compost in agriculture Compost may replace peat in horticulture and home gardening, reducing greenhouse emissions and wetland exploitation Anaerobic digestion has the additional benefit of producing biogas that may be used as a fuel Pesticide use can be reduced by proper use of the disease suppressive properties of compost Resource Recovery and Reuse in Organic Solid Waste Management disseminates at advanced scientific level the potential of environmental biotechnology for the recovery and reuse of products from solid waste. Several options to recover energy out of organic solid waste from domestic, agricultural and industrial origin are presented and discussed and existing economically feasible treatment systems that produce energy out of solid waste and recover useful by-products in the form of fertiliser or soil conditioner are demonstrated. The potential of environmental biotechnology is highlighted from different perspectives: societal, technological and practical.

"In a rapidly urbanizing global society, solid waste management will be a key challenge facing all the world's cities. This publication provides a fresh perspective and new data on one of the biggest issues in urban development.

Solid waste is a major urban challenge worldwide and decisions over which technologies or methods to apply can have beneficial or detrimental long-term consequences. Inappropriate management of solid waste can lead to damaging environmental impacts, particularly in the megacities of the Global South. Urban Recycling Cooperatives explores the multiple narratives and interdisciplinary nature of waste studies, drawing attention to the pressing social, economic and environmental challenges related to waste management. The book asks questions such as: how do we define waste and our relation to it; who is involved in dealing with waste; and what power interactions become manifest over issues of accessing and managing waste? In recent years informal cooperatives have emerged, devoted to recycling household and business waste before reclassifying it and redirecting it to the authorities. Hence, these workers are able to reclaim significant amounts of natural resources and thus contribute to the saving of resources and lessened waste management expenditures. With particular reference to the Brazilian megalopolis of São Paulo, this book describes this paradigm shift in the general understanding of waste as unwanted discard towards the recognition of waste as a resource that must be recovered for reuse or recycling. It would be of interest to students and policy makers working in international development and waste management.

This book constitutes the joint refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Next Generation Wired/Wireless Advanced Networks and Systems, NEW2AN 2015, and the 8th Conference on Internet of Things and Smart Spaces, ruSMART 2015, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in August 2015. The 74 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The 15 papers selected for ruSMART are organized in topical sections on IoT infrastructure, IoT platforms, smart spaces and IoT cases, and smart services and solutions. The 59 papers from NEW2AN deal with the following topics: streaming, video, and TCP applications, mobile "ad hoc" networks, security, and clouds, sensor networks and IoT, cellular systems, novel systems and techniques, business and services, signals and circuits, optical and satellite systems, and advanced materials and their properties.