Risk Assessment for Illegal Waste Open Burning

Abstract

The area of Naples and Campania region, in Italy, has been experiencing the dramatic consequences of diffuse open burning of illegal waste, resulting in possible threats to human health. The need of evaluating a risk index of open burning rises from this emergency where it is important quantify the risk to support local stakeholder to intervene timely and effectively order and to prioritize the interventions. Nevertheless, open burning phenomenon is still uncontrolled all over the world, and implies not only impacts on health at local level but emission of pollutants in the atmosphere. A deep understanding can support policy makers in order to prevent risky behaviours and to mitigate the severity of their occurrences. The risk model related to open burning is still an open issue, and the attempt to model the probability of its occurrence is completely new. This paper proposes a model for the evaluation of risk of illegal waste open burning in Campania enabling the identification of the priority of intervention in order to optimize the available resources. In detail, it defines a layered and seamless approach to evaluate the related impact at different levels of accuracy leveraging on reference guidelines.

Progressive monitoring of micro-dumps: a case study over the Campania Region (Italy)

“…While the hazard is understood as a property of the micro-dump detached from the territorial context (a micro-dump in a deserted area and one located in a populated area are equally hazardous, then their potential dangerousness is exactly the same), the risk associated with the hazard instead expresses the hazard contextualized in the geographical context (the associated risk is high if the hazard is located in a populated area while it is negligible if the area is completely deserted). A suitable risk model for assessing fire risk is illustrated in [7]. The factors influencing the risk calculation, retrievable historical data provided by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) and from the Copernicus Land Monitoring Services, are the composition and extension of the micro-dumps (for the evaluation of the hazard), the anthropic use of the territory (for the evaluation of the exposure) and the density of the population (for the evaluation of the impact).…”

Fires in the Waste Management Sector in Romania. Frequency, Causes and Spatial Distribution

“…Alongside these substantial but rather infrequent events, there is the widespread practice of burning waste on a regular basis, as a means of waste disposal, especially in developing countries, contributing to a slow and insidious environmental pollution (Ferronato and Torretta, 2019;IPEN, 2021). However, the backyard burning of waste and setting dumpsites on fire, while less frequent, is still present in the US and EU as well (Muñoz and Panero, 2006;Mihai et al, 2019;Buzzo et al, 2021), requiring burning bans and other measures in order to curb these practices (e.g., EC, 2009;WDHS, 2015).…”