The report by the National Academy of Science Committee on Institutional Considerations in Reducing the Generation of Hazardous Industrial Waste examines key institutional, or nontechnical, factors that affect the generation of hazardous waste by industry. It provides a framework for evaluating public policies, both regulatory and nonregulatory, to reduce the generation of hazardous waste. The ...

A dynamic discrete time model is estimated in order to analyze the evolution of perceived risk around a hazardous waste site and its effect on property values. Residential property values are modeled as a function of housing attributes and perceived risk to health from a nearby hazardous waste site using an hedonic price framework. Perceived risk enters the model as a state equation, which incl...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the risk of olfactory-related hazardous events in patients with impaired olfactory function. DESIGN Retrospective cohort study. SETTING A university-based clinic for smell and taste disorders. PATIENTS A total of 445 patients who underwent olfactory testing between 1983 and 2001. INTERVENTIONS Patient interview, olfactory testing. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES (1) Freque...

Alert level frameworks advise agencies on a sequence of monitoring and management actions, and are implemented so as to reduce the risk of the public coming into contact with hazardous substances. Their effectiveness relies on the detection of the hazard, but with many systems not receiving any regular monitoring, pollution events often go undetected. We developed toxicological risk assessment ...

The natural resource damage assessment (NRDA) provisions of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) and the Oil Pollution Act (OPA) are complex and have been difficult to implement. The complexity and difficulty in implementation arise both from the assessment procedures specified in agency NRDA guidance and from the limited ability of ecologists to qu...

The need to develop biological effects monitoring to facilitate a reliable assessment of hazardous substances has been emphasized in the Baltic Sea Action Plan of the Helsinki Commission. An integrated chemical-biological approach is vitally important for the understanding and proper assessment of anthropogenic pressures and their effects on the Baltic Sea. Such an approach is also necessary fo...

To facilitate the early detection of neurotoxicity in workers exposed to hazardous substances, we assembled a set of noninvasive neurobehavioral tests designed to assess memory, verbal concept formation, visuomotor performance, and mood. The tests were administered to an unexposed reference population and multivariate prediction equations were developed to control for effects of age, gender, an...

Environmental Justice is a movement that was born in the early 1980s to assure fair distribution of environmental risks and benefits (Bullard 1996). In many occasions, minority communities are more affected by environmentally hazardous substances and activities than other population groups. This normally happens because they either ignore the problem or have less power to have an opinion about ...

We describe a collaborative effort between the U.S., India, and Poland to track acute chemical releases during 2005-2007. In all three countries, fixed facility events were more common than transportation-related events; manufacturing and transportation/warehousing were the most frequently involved industries; and equipment failure and human error were the primary contributing factors. The most...

The EU Directive on Waste Electrical and Electrical Equipment (WEEE) (2002/96/EC), to be implemented in stages from August 2004, attempts to tackle the growing quantity WEEE by making producers responsible for the costs of the collection and recycling of their products at the end of usable life. This is considered to give producers a financial incentive to reduce waste at source through eco-des...