The convertors would spew it out,"" employee Arturo Hernandez recalled, referring to molten metal. ""You'd see the ground, the dirt, catch on fire. . . . If you slip, you'd be like a little pat of butter, melting away."" Hernandez was describing work at ASARCO El Paso, a smelter and onetime economic powerhouse situated in the city's heart just a few yards north of the Mexican border. For more than a century the smelter produced vast quantities of copper - along with millions of tons of toxins. During six of those years, the smelter also burned highly toxic industrial waste under the guise of processing copper, with dire consequences for worker and community health. Copper Stain is a history of environmental injustice, corporate malfeasance, political treachery, and a community fighting for its life. The book gives voice to nearly one hundred Mexican Americans directly affected by these events. Their frank and often heartrending stories, published here for the first time, evoke the grim reality of laboring under giant machines and lava-spewing furnaces while turning mountains of rock into copper ingots, all in service to an employer largely indifferent to workers' welfare. With horror and humor, anger, courage, and sorrow, the authors and their interviewees reveal how ASARCO subjected its employees and an unsuspecting public to pollution, diseases, and early death - with little in the way of compensation. Elaine Hampton and Cynthia C. Ontiveros weave this eloquent testimony into a cautionary tale of toxic exposure, community activism, and a corporate employer's dubious relationship with ethics - set against the political tug-of-war between industry's demands and government's obligation to protect the health of its people and the environment.

Reliability, Risk and Safety: Back to the Future covers topics on reliability, risk and safety issues, including risk and reliability analysis methods, maintenance optimization, human factors, and risk management. The application areas range from nuclear engineering, oil and gas industry, electrical and civil engineering to information technology and communication, security, transportation, health and medicine or critical infrastructures. Significant attention is paid to societal factors influencing the use of reliability and risk assessment methods, and to combinatorial analysis, which has found its way into the analysis of probabilities and risk, from which quantified risk analysis developed. Integral demonstrations of the use of risk analysis and safety assessment are provided in many practical applications concerning major technological systems and structures. Reliability, Risk and Safety: Back to the Future will be of interest to academics and engineers interested in nuclear engineering, oil and gas engineering, electrical engineering, civil engineering, information technology, communication, and infrastructure.

In recent years, the role of information and communications technologies in the development of agriculture and environmental issues has received significant attention in different types of international forums. With new technologies constantly developing, there is a need for research dedicated to technological progress. Innovations and Trends in Environmental and Agricultural Informatics provides emerging research on the design, development, and implementation of complex agricultural and environmental information systems, addressing the integration of several scientific domains including agronomy, mathematics, economics, and computer science. While highlighting topics such as image quality assessment, environmental policy, and supervised classification, this publication explores the applications and progress of various technologies within agricultural and environmental professions. This book is an important resource for researchers, professionals, academics, students, and scientists seeking current research on the rapidly evolving field of technology integration in agricultural production and environmental issues.

The use of certain deterrent measures and supporting mechanisms of macroeconomic environmental policies is greatly important. As the environment continues to falter, it is increasingly imperative to develop new technologies and methodologies that have the potential to improve sustainability and cleanliness. Effective Solutions to Pollution Mitigation for Public Welfare is a critical scholarly resource that examines alternative solution methods to mitigate the pollution generated by industrial sources. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as renewable energy, climate change, and water security, this book is geared towards graduate students, managers, researchers, academics, engineers, and government officials seeking current research on solutions that are convenient and practicable for manufacturers to implement.

Plant Metal Interaction: Emerging Remediation Techniques covers different heavy metals and their effect on soils and plants, along with the remediation techniques currently available. As cultivable land is declining day-by-day as a result of increased metals in our soil and water, there is an urgent need to remediate these effects. This multi-contributed book is divided into four sections covering the whole of plant metal interactions, including heavy metals, approaches to alleviate heavy metal stress, microbial approaches to remove heavy metals, and phytoremediation.

Understanding Complex Ecosystem Dynamics: A Systems and Engineering Perspective takes a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on complex system dynamics, beginning with a discussion of relevant systems and engineering skills and practices, including an explanation of the systems approach and its major elements. From this perspective, the author formulates an ecosystem dynamics functionality-based framework to guide ecological investigations. Next, because complex system theory (across many subject matter areas) is crucial to the work of this book, relevant network theory, nonlinear dynamics theory, cellular automata theory, and roughness (fractal) theory is covered in some detail. This material serves as an important resource as the book proceeds. In the context of all of the foregoing discussion and investigation, a view of the characteristics of ecological network dynamics is constructed. This view, in turn, is the basis for the central hypothesis of the book, i.e., ecological networks are ever-changing networks with propagation dynamics that are punctuated, local-to-global, and perhaps most importantly fractal. To analyze and fully test this hypothesis, an innovative ecological network dynamics model is defined, designed, and developed. The modeling approach, which seeks to emulate features of real-world ecological networks, does not make a priori assumptions about ecological network dynamics, but rather lets the dynamics develop as the model simulation runs. Model analysis results corroborate the central hypothesis. Additional important insights and principles are suggested by the model analysis results and by the other supporting investigations of this book - and can serve as a basis for going-forward complex system dynamics research, not only for ecological systems but for complex systems in general.

"Handbook of Recycling" is an authoritative review of the current state-of-the-art of recycling, reuse and reclamation processes commonly implemented today and how they interact with one another. The book addresses several material flows, including iron, steel, aluminum and other metals, pulp and paper, plastics, glass, construction materials, industrial by-products, and more. It also details various recycling technologies as well as recovery and collection techniques. To completely round out the picture of recycling, the book considers policy and economic implications, including the impact of recycling on energy use, sustainable development, and the environment.

With contemporary recycling literature scattered across disparate, unconnected articles, this book is a crucial aid to students and researchers in a range of disciplines, from materials and environmental science to public policy studies.
Portrays recent and emerging technologies in metal recycling, by-product utilization and management of post-consumer wasteUses life cycle analysis to show how to reclaim valuable resources from mineral and metallurgical wastesUses examples from current professional and industrial practice, with policy and economic implications

Renewable energy (RE) is a subject of great interest today. It is one of the two main means for implementing climate change mitigation programmes, and presently the only perceived means for replacing the declining global fossil fuel reserves. It also helps fight poverty and assists in the global quest for gender equity by taking clean energy where it is needed most for development. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that there is so much coverage of RE in both the conventional media and the internet by media and tech writers, economists and bloggers, many of who only have a partial understanding of the technology itself. The end result is mostly promotional rhetoric that says little about the true value of the technology, and leads to a confused picture for the serious individual or decision-maker who wants to know what the technology is really capable of doing. This book provides a clear and factual picture of the status of RE and its capabilities today. The need for such a book was first realized by the author when he was engaged in a renewable energy capacity-building project encompassing countries from Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Pacific. The book is largely non-technical in nature; it does however contain enough mention of the science and technology to enable readers to go further with their own investigations should they wish to. The book covers all areas of renewable energy (RE), starting from biomass energy and hydropower and proceeding to wind, solar and geothermal energy before ending with an overview of ocean energy. It begins with a simple introduction to the physical principles of the RE technologies, followed by an enumeration of the requirements for their successful implementation. The last two chapters consider how the technologies are actually being implemented today and their roles in climate change mitigation and poverty alleviation.

The field of environmental history emerged just decades ago but has established itself as one of the most innovative and important new approaches to history, one that bridges the human and natural world, the humanities and the sciences. With the current trend towards internationalizing history, environmental history is perhaps the quintessential approach to studying subjects outside the nation-state model, with pollution, global warming, and other issues affecting the earth not stopping at national borders. With 25 essays, this Handbook is global in scope and innovative in organization, looking at the field thematically through such categories as climate, disease, oceans, the body, energy, consumerism, and international relations.

Hydrology is a key influence on water security, environmental sustainability, agricultural production, energy, and transport, especially in unique environments such as arid regions and the tropics, where degradation issues on water and land can threaten the livelihoods of poor communities. With implications in urbanization, landscape architecture, and sanitation, enhancing the practice of water use, management, and planning is imperative for the sustainable development of these regions. Hydrology and Water Resources Management in Arid, Semi-Arid, and Tropical Region is an essential research publication that seeks to improve scientific understanding and sharing of data in hydrology and integrated water resources management of arid, semi-arid, and tropical regions in order to enhance water governance and alleviate reduction in the vulnerability of water resources systems to global changes. Featuring a wide range of topics such as hydrometeorology, sustainable development, and climate change, this book is ideal for researchers, technology developers, academicians, policymakers, government officials, and students.

Research on the cutting edge of economics, ecology, and ethics is presented in this timely study. Building from a theoretical critique of the tradition of cost-benefit analysis, the contributors lay the foundation for a macroeconomics of environmental sustainability and distributive justice. Attention is then turned to three of the most critical areas of social and environmental applied research - biodiversity, climate change, and energy. The contributors redefine progress away from growth and toward development. To this end, the first section of the book tackles the dominant framework used in the US today to evaluate tradeoffs between economic growth and its inherent externalities. Succeeding chapters cover a wide variety of studies related to biodiversity health and energy. Each section is anchored with overviews by top scholars in these areas - including Herman Daly, Carl McDaniel, Stephen Schneider, and Nathan Hagens - and followed by detailed analyses reflecting the transdisciplinary approach of ecological economics. Students and scholars of ecological, environmental, and natural resource economics, sustainability sciences, and environmental studies will find this book of great interest. Non-profit and government agencies in search of methods and cases that merge the study of ecology and economics will also find the analyses of great practical value.

As population growth accelerates, researchers and professionals face challenges as they attempt to plan for the future. Urban planning is a significant component in addressing the key concerns as the world population moves towards the city and leaves the rural environment behind, yet there are many factors to consider for a well rounded community. The Handbook of Research on Social, Economic, and Environmental Sustainability in the Development of Smart Cities brings together the necessary research and interdisciplinary discussion to address dilemmas created by population growth and the expansion of urban environments. This publication is an essential reference source for researchers, academicians, investors, and practitioners interested in the urban planning and technological advancements necessary for the creation of smart cities.