Planning, Design, and Management of Hazardous Waste Disposal by Environmental Systems Engineering Approach

Abstract

In the past century, the natural environment has provided for our development needs in support of rapid industrialization and urbanization. As the world’s population grows over time, human beings have progressively made greater demands on the environment through an increase in technology capacity, energy demand, international trade, and social complexity. To explore the ultimate limitation of nature, an analysis of the environment in terms of the physical, chemical, and biological processes, and the relationship of these processes as well as the interactions between them and human society is essential. While certain facets of the various processes may be overlooked in the analysis, the seamless integration of them after respective analysis can be even more complicated and difficult to model. The fragmented analytical effort by accounting for individual components separately is no longer acceptable in decision analysis. Recent challenges in decision making require development of a radically different approach for assessing management options by using various tools and methodologies that can be broadly applied for conducting integrated assessments in conjunction with the embedded complexities of interest. Such integration of scientific research into policy formulation requires covering not only pertinent quantitative costbenefit data but also relevant risk information and social response. While state-of-the-science models characterizing the transport of contaminants in different environmental compartments are indeed necessary to rigorously understand the long-term dynamics of pollutant behavior, they may be of limited value in immediate policy planning and regulatory studies. Hazardous, toxic, and radioactive waste management frequently involves tremendous managerial efforts in dealing with social, economic, environmental, and ecological impacts when making disposal options safe, cost-effective, risk-informed, and consensus-oriented. Irrespective of the adopted methodologies, policy formulation with respect to planning, design, and management of waste disposal requires several critical decisions that eventually direct the path, progress, and success of such endeavors. However, a number of important conceptual ideas in the area of systems science and systems engineering have emerged when we consider the interactions between living systems and the nonliving environment in making critical decisions with respect to waste disposal. The system-based approach enables us to investigate the complex interactions fundamental to the coevolution of engineered and natural systems. Recent advances in environmental systems engineering lean toward making effective the search for the sustainable development strategy, via integrative efforts, that could intimately link domain knowledge with the envisioned system-based approach as the availability and scarcity of environmental resources become critical. Nevertheless, capturing the social, economic, ecological, and environmental objectives into a