Forensic Geology in Environmental Crime: Illegal Waste Movement Burial in Northern Ireland

The illegal burial of waste often occurs in locations where loose, transferable material is abundant, allowing covert pits to be dug or filled. The transfer of waste material onto suspects and their vehicles during loading, unloading, and burial is common, as is the case during other criminal activities such as the burial of murder victims. We use two case studies to show that the established principles of using geological materials in excluding or linking suspects can be applied to illegal waste disposal. In the first case, the layering of different geological materials on the tailgate of a container used to transport toxic waste demonstrated where the vehicle had been and denied the owner's alibi, associating him with an illegal dumpsite. In the second case, an unusual suite of minerals, recovered from a suspect's trousers, provided the intelligence that led environmental law enforcement officers to an illegal waste burial site.

Opportunity cost based analysis of corporate eco-efficiency: A methodology and its application to the CO2-efficiency of German companies

In this paper, we propose the return-to-cost-ratio (RCR) as an alternative approach to the analysis of operational eco-efficiency of companies based on the notion of opportunity costs. RCR helps to overcome two fundamental deficits of existing approaches to eco-efficiency. (1) It translates eco-efficiency into managerial terms by applying the well-established notion of opportunity costs to eco-efficiency analysis. (2) RCR allows to identify and quantify the drivers behind changes in corporate eco-efficiency. RCR is applied to the analysis of the CO2-efficiency of German companies in order to illustrate its usefulness for a detailed analysis of changes in corporate eco-efficiency as well as for the development of effective environmental strategies. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.