Sustainable Solid Waste Management: A Systems Engineering Approach

A comprehensive guide on solid waste management

Interactions between human activities and the environment are complicated and often difficult to quantify. In many occasions, judging where the optimal balance should lie among environmental protection, social well-being, economic growth, and technological progress is complex. The use of a systems engineering approach will fill in the gap contributing to how we understand the intricacy by a holistic way and how we generate better sustainable solid waste management practices. This book aims to advance interdisciplinary understanding of intertwined facets between policy and technology relevant to solid waste management issues interrelated to climate change, land use, economic growth, environmental pollution, industrial ecology, and population dynamics.

Additional tools are implemented throughout the book to help grasp the concepts of sustainable solid waste management

• The main issues concerning all sustainability aspects in solid waste management are introduced in the preliminary chapters

• Practical cases are accompanied by illustrative examples

• Study questions and chapter recaps are included

Sustainable Solid Waste Management will help stimulate researchers in this field to work on more practical questions and provide some insights to solid waste management engineers who want to use systems analysis techniques for their application problems.

Ni-Bin Chang, PhD, is an elected fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Society, an elected member of the European Academy of Sciences, as well as a senior member of the IEEE. He has co-authored and authored seven books including Systems Analysis for Sustainable Engineering: Theory and Applications and over 200 peer-reviewed journal articles.

Ana Pires, PhD, is a member of MARE - Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre (ex-IMAR-CMA), Portugal, and is a research engineer in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, New University of Lisbon (Departamento de Ciências e Engenharia do Ambiente, Universidade Nova de Lisboa).