This informative publication provides an introduction to the public health implications of hazardous waste incineration. The complexities involved in defining, measuring, and regulating the nation's hazardous waste are discussed, as well as brief descriptions of the hazardous waste incineration process. Summaries of the data base for the incinerator test burns conducted by or for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are presented, along with a description of the four components of risk analysis, sample calculations of both carcinogenic and noncarcinogenic health risk estimates, and the predictive methodology employed in quantitative risk assessment for hazardous waste incinerators. Also discussed are the risk estimates for exposure to hazardous waste incinerator emissions, inhalation exposure to incinerator stack releases of heavy metals and to polychlorinated biphenyl compounds, and ingestion exposure to incinerated releases through the terrestrial food chain. This book will be of interest to local regulatory officials, incineration facility operators, researchers in the hazardous waste areas, and concerned citizens.
This much-needed book provides an enlightening perspective on the environmental and human health impacts of municipal solid waste (MSW) incineration. Over 100 tables and figures allows speedy access to important data you will refer to again and again. The comprehensive text assesses the human health risks associated with exposure to facility emitted pollutants-especially the highly toxic dioxin. It includes an evaluation of multipathway (inhalation and food chain) exposures. This essential publication also evaluates facility emissions, plausible air concentrations, the potential for deposition of pollutants onto plant, soil, and water surfaces, the movement and accumulation of pollutants through environmental media, and the potential for human exposure. Health Effects of Municipal Waste Incineration is an up-to-date volume which encourages readers to formulate opinions about some of the fundamental issues affecting the management of municipal solid waste. Anyone involved with environmental science, hazardous waste, toxicology, risk analysis and/or environmental engineering will certainly value and utilize this well-written resource.
Cybernetics, a science concerned with understanding how systems are regulated, has reflected the preoccupations of the century in which it was born. Regulation is important in twentieth century society, where both machines and social organizations are complex. Cybernetics focused on and became primarily associated with the homeostasis or stability of system behavior and with the negative feedbacks that stabilize systems. It paid less attention to the processes opposite to negative feedback, the positive feedback processes that act to change systems. We attempt to redress the balance here by illustrating the enormous importance of positive feedbacks in natural systems. In an article in the American Scientist in 1963, Maruyama called for increased attention to this topic, noting that processes of change could occur when a "deviation in anyone component of the system caused deviations in other components that acted back on the first component to reinforce of amplify the initial deviation." The deviation amplification is the result of positive feedback among system components. Maruyama demonstrated by numerous examples that the neglect of such processes was unjustified and suggested that a new branch of cybernetics, "the second cybernetics," be devoted to their study.
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