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...

The countries of Eastern and Central Europe have emerged from a political system which for decades has ignored protection of human health from hazardous wastes. While the economies of the countries in this region are stretched, awareness and concern about hazardous waste issues are a part of the new realities. At a recent conference sponsored in part by the National Institute of Environmental H...

A large amount of energetic materials including propellants, high explosives, pyrotechnics are subjected to disposal either due to expiry of their useful life or rejection in the manufacturing process. The environmental regulations do not allow the hazardous materials for open burning / detonation in view of the health hazard involved in these operations. The present paper describes the hazard ...

The capability to predict short-term maximum individual exposure is very important for several applications including, for example, deliberate/accidental release of hazardous substances, odour fluctuations or material flammability level exceedance. Recently, authors have proposed a simple approach relating maximum individual exposure to parameters such as the fluctuation intensity and the conce...

Child Labour has become a growing phenomenon across the world. Millions of children are working in hazardous and exploitative conditions harmful to their physical, mental and moral development. When we talk of health of child workers, most of the children work more than 12 hours, inhuman conditions which result in physical deformities and make them vulnerable to several infectious and other dis...

Emergency response planning in case of a major accident (hazardous material event, nuclear accident) is very important for the protection of the public and workers' safety and health. In this context, several protective actions can be performed, such as, evacuation of an area; protection of the population in buildings; and use of personal protective equipment. The best solution is not unique wh...

Introduction With the introduction of the EC Directives on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) (2002/96/EC), the Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances (RoHS) in Electrical and Electronic Equipment (2002/95/EC), and Packaging and Packaging Waste (94/62/EC), the onus is on retailers and manufacturers to reduce their waste output and better manage their respective log...

For a product containing a strong sensitizer to be considered a hazardous substance and to require cautionary labeling under the FHSA, the product must be capable of causing substantial personal injury or substantial illness during, or as a result of, customary or reasonably foreseeable handling or use, including reasonably foreseeable ingestion by children. This requires consideration of the r...