Sociological perspective on the siting of hazardous waste facilities
The siting of hazardous waste facilities has been, and will likely continue to be, both an important societal need and a publically controversial topic. Sites have been denounced, shamed, banned, and moved at the same time that the national need for their installation and use has grown. Despite available technologies and physical science capabilities, the effective siting of facilitites stands more as a major contemporary social issue than it is a technological problem. Traditional social impact assessment approaches to the siting process have largely failed to meaningfully contribute to successful project implementation; these efforts have largely ignored the public perception aspects of risk and hazard on the success or failure of facility siting. This paper proposes that the siting of hazardous waste facilities could well take advantage of two rich but somewhat disparate research histories in the social sciences. A convergent and integrated approach would result from the successful blending of social impact assessment, which seeks to define and mitigate problems, with an approach used in hazards policy studies, which has sought to understand and incorporate public risk perceptions into effective public decision-making. It is proposed in this paper that the integration of these two approaches is necessary for arriving at more readily acceptable solutions to siting hazardous waste facilities. This paper illustrates how this integration of approaches could be implemented.
- Research Organization:
- Argonne National Lab., IL (USA); Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins (USA). Hazards Assessment Lab.
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-31-109-ENG-38
- OSTI ID:
- 5960673
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-850314-15; ON: DE85007950
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Waste management '85, Tucson, AZ, USA, 24 Mar 1985; Other Information: Portions of this document are illegible in microfiche products
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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29 ENERGY PLANNING
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HAZARDOUS MATERIALS
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SITE SELECTION
DECISION MAKING
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SOCIAL IMPACT
MANAGEMENT
MATERIALS
WASTE MANAGEMENT
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