Waste Management in the 21st Century
Since the 1970s waste management has gone through three stages. Following the creation of environmental regulatory agencies in virtually all developed countries in the 1970s, waste management focused on command and control regulations affecting end of pipe controls, burying of waste in improved landfills, and incineration. As the costs of this strategy rose, emphasis shifted in the 1980s to pollution prevention, particularly for the most toxic substances, and public disclosure, most notably through the U.S. EPAs Toxic Release Inventory. With the recent acceleration in globalization, the spread of multinational corporations, the emergence of civil society NGOs in developed and developing economies with global reach, and the enactment of increasingly stringent regulations affecting not only production processes, but products themselves (such as the EUs RoHS and WEEE Directives for electric and electronic equipment and the EUs End of Vehicle Life (ELV) Directive for automobiles) waste management has entered a new phase. In this new phase, management of waste is governed by strategic interactions between environmental regulatory agencies, NGOs in civil society and communities, multinational corporations (with their own corporate and worldwide environmental strategies) and supra-national regulations such as those of the European Union that affect imports into the Union. The confluence of these developments is pushing waste management in a zero waste, high recyclability direction. Developing economies that are exceedingly open to trade and investment and dependent on the export of manufactures need to harmonize their waste management strategies to these developments if they wish to continue to grow by linking with the global economy.
Michael T. Rock
Department of Economics, Bryn Mawr College
国际会议
The 3rd International Conference on Waste Management and Technology(第三届固体废物管理与技术国际研讨会)
北京
英文
469
2008-11-05（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）