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      “This is our next problem”: cleaning up from the covid-19 response

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          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Highlights

          • The Covid-19 pandemic will produce an immense amount of waste to be managed.

          • The waste impact of our socio-cultural responses to disasters is poorly understood.

          • The waste impact of disasters, will increase due to climate change.

          • We propose several research pathways on waste impacts of our response to COVID-19.

          Abstract

          The purpose of this discussion is to highlight the essential role that solid waste management must play in a humanitarian response towards disasters, in particular the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. We highlight a number of potential avenues for scholarly investigation into the waste impacts of our response to Covid-19, but in particular, briefly unpacks the relationship between disasters, consumption and disposability as one potential research topic. The discussion is intended to start a conversation that is, at the moment, critically relevant, and to contribute to a more inclusive, and less normatively Western waste management studies discourse

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          Most cited references13

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          Recycling disaster waste: Feasibility, method and effectiveness

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            Canterbury earthquake construction and demolition waste management: issues and improvement suggestions

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              Is Open Access

              Restoration of services in disrupted infrastructure systems: A network science approach

              Due to the ubiquitous nature of disruptive extreme events, functionality of the critical infrastructure systems (CIS) is constantly at risk. In case of a disruption, in order to minimize the negative impact to the society, service networks operating on the CIS should be restored as quickly as possible. In this paper, we introduce a novel network science inspired measure to quantify the criticality of components within a disrupted service network and develop a restoration heuristic (Cent-Restore) that prioritizes restoration efforts based on this measure. As an illustrative case study, we consider a road network blocked by debris in the aftermath of a natural disaster. The debris obstructs the flow of relief aid and search-and-rescue teams between critical facilities and disaster sites, debilitating the emergency service network. In this context, the problem is defined as finding a schedule to clear the roads with the limited resources. First, we develop a mixed-integer programming model for the problem. Then we validate the efficiency and accuracy of the Cent-Restore heuristic on randomly generated instances by comparing it to the model. Furthermore, we use Cent-Restore to recommend real-time restoration plans for disrupted road networks of Boston and Manhattan and analyze the performance of the plans over time through resilience curves. We compare Cent-Restore to the current restoration guidelines proposed by FEMA and other strategies that prioritize the restoration efforts based on different measures. As a result we confirm the importance of including specific post-disruption attributes of the networks to create effective restoration strategies. Moreover, we explore the relationship between a service network’s resilience and its topological and operational characteristics under different disruption scenarios. The methods and insights provided in this work can be extended to other disrupted large-scale critical infrastructure systems in which the ultimate goal is to enable the functions of the overlaying service networks.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Waste Manag
                Waste Manag
                Waste Management (New York, N.y.)
                Elsevier Ltd.
                0956-053X
                1879-2456
                8 May 2020
                8 May 2020
                Affiliations
                [a ]South African Research Chair in Waste and Climate Change, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Centenary Building, Howard College Campus, Durban, South Africa 4001
                [b ]Department of Environmental Health, University of Malawi, The Polytechnic, Blantyre, Malawi
                Article
                S0956-053X(20)30232-4
                10.1016/j.wasman.2020.05.006
                7205701
                32414623
                439b9ceb-b4b1-4660-a505-fa05c134264a
                © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

                Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

                History
                : 19 April 2020
                : 1 May 2020
                : 4 May 2020
                Categories
                Article

                Environmental management, Policy & Planning
                waste management,disasters,climate change,consumption

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