An overview of waste crime, its characteristics, and the vulnerability of the EU waste sector

While waste is increasingly viewed as a resource to be globally traded, increased regulatory control on waste across Europe has created the conditions where waste crime now operates alongside a legitimate waste sector. Waste crime,is an environmental crime and a form of white-collar crime, which exploits the physical characteristics of waste, the complexity of the collection and downstream infrastructure, and the market opportunities for profit. This paper highlights some of the factors which make the waste sector vulnerable to waste crime. These factors include new legislation and its weak regulatory enforcement, the economics of waste treatment, where legal and safe treatment of waste can be more expensive than illegal operations, the complexity of the waste sector and the different actors who can have some involvement, directly or indirectly, in the movement of illegal wastes, and finally that waste can be hidden or disguised and creates an opportunity for illegal businesses to operate alongside legitimate waste operators. The study also considers waste crime from the perspective of particular waste streams that are often associated with illegal shipment or through illegal treatment and disposal. For each, the nature of the crime which occurs is shown to differ, but for each, vulnerabilities to waste crime are evident. The paper also describes some approaches which can be adopted by regulators and those involved in developing new legislation for identifying where opportunities for waste crime occurs and how to prevent it.

Developing a Reporting Guideline for Social and Psychological Intervention Trials

Social and psychological interventions are often complex. Understanding randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of these complex interventions requires a detailed description of the interventions tested and the methods used to evaluate them; however, RCT reports often omit, or inadequately report, this information. Incomplete and inaccurate reporting hinders the optimal use of research, wastes resources, and fails to meet ethical obligations to research participants and consumers. In this article, we explain how reporting guidelines have improved the quality of reports in medicine and describe the ongoing development of a new reporting guideline for RCTs: Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials-SPI (an extension for social and psychological interventions). We invite readers to participate in the project by visiting our website, in order to help us reach the best-informed consensus on these guidelines (http://tinyurl.com/CONSORT-study).

Session organiser/chair: Architecture, Infrastructure and the Making of Modern Ireland

‘A free Ireland would drain the bogs, would harness the rivers, would plant the wastes, would nationalise the railways and the waterways, would improve agriculture, would protect fisheries, would foster industries, would promote commerce, and beautify the cities …’ (Padraig Pearse, ‘From a Hermitage’, 1913)

Somewhat unusually in his often romantic writings Padraig Pearse – poet, pedagogue and revolutionary – chose to describe the future of an independent Ireland in terms of infrastructure and technological processes. Terence Brown’s locating of this excerpt at the beginning his seminal work Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-2002 highlights the simultaneous and interlinking construction of both a new physical and cultural landscape for an independent modern nation. Lacking any significant industrial complex, the construction of new infrastructures in Ireland was seen throughout the 20th century as a key element in the building of the new State, just as the adoption of an international style modernism in architecture was perceived as a way to escape the colonial past. For Paul N. Edwards modernity and infrastructure are intimately connected.

‘infrastructures simultaneously shape and are shaped – in other words, co-construct – the condition of modernity. By linking macro, meso, and micro scales of time, space and social organisation, they form the stable foundation of modern social worlds’ (2003: 186).
Simultaneously omnipresent and invisible – infra means beneath – Edwards also points out that infrastructure tends only to become apparent when it is either new or broken. Interpreting the meso scale as being that of the building, this session calls for papers that critically and analytically investigate aspects of the architectures of infrastructure in 20th-century Ireland. Like the territory they explore these papers may range across scales to oscillate between a concern for the artefact and its physical landscape, and the larger, often hidden systems and networks that co-define this architecture.

Using microbiological tracers to assess the impact of winter land use restrictions on the quality of stream headwaters in a small catchment.

Diverse land use activities can elevate risk of microbiological contamination entering stream headwaters. Spatially distributed water quality monitoring carried out across a 17km(2) agricultural catchment aimed to characterize microbiological contamination reaching surface water and investigate whether winter agricultural land use restrictions proved effective in addressing water quality degradation. Combined flow and concentration data revealed no significant difference in fecal indicator organism (FIO) fluxes in base flow samples collected during the open and prohibited periods for spreading organic fertilizer, while relative concentrations of Escherichia coli, fecal streptococci and sulfite reducing bacteria indicated consistently fresh fecal pollution reached aquatic receptors during both periods. Microbial source tracking, employing Bacteroides 16S rRNA gene markers, demonstrated a dominance of bovine fecal waste in river water samples upstream of a wastewater treatment plant discharge during open periods. This contrasted with responses during prohibited periods where human-derived signatures dominated. Differences in microbiological signature, when viewed with hydrological data, suggested that increasing groundwater levels restricted vertical infiltration of effluent from on-site wastewater treatment systems and diverted it to drains and surface water. Study results reflect seasonality of contaminant inputs, while suggesting winter land use restrictions can be effective in limiting impacts of agricultural wastes to base flow water quality.