Organising disaster waste management as a critical infrastructure

Disasters produce huge amounts of waste, for instance, ten years of landfills were used for the Great Hanshi-Awaji earthquake waste in 1995 in Kobe (Japan) (Lauritzen, 1998). If poorly managed, disaster waste can slow down the rescue and reconstruction activities, spread diseases, affect the environment or reduce the long-term resiliency of the waste system (Brown et al., 2011). Thus, academics acknowledge the need of planning for disaster waste (Crowley, 2017; Gabrielli et al., 2018; Poudel et al., 2018).

Many countries have specific management policies for critical infrastructures. Critical infrastructures are activities that contribute to the production and distribution of goods or services essential to the exercise of State authority, the functioning of the economy, the maintenance of defence potential or the security of the Nation. These activities are, by nature, difficult to substitute or replace. Operators identified as “operators of vital importance” have been long included in national security strategies in terms of protection against malicious acts and natural, technological and health risks. They have to identify the risk they face, apply prevention measures and be ready to respond in case of an event. Therefore, operators of urban systems are generally used to planning for natural disasters.

Most urban systems, such as water management, energy and transportation, are considered critical infrastructures. It is generally not the case for waste management, as we can see in France, but also in New Zealand (Brown et al., 2010), Japan and the United-State (Aung and Watanabe, 2009).

Yet, waste system has many similarities with other urban systems in terms of management, functioning and modelling. We therefore argue that disaster waste management could benefit from learning from the emergency planning organisation of urban systems of vital importance.

This presentation will present the organisational obligations of urban lifeline systems to discuss whether or not the waste system should become an activity of vital importance and what it would change in its organisation and planning.

 

REFERENCES

Aung, Z.Z., Watanabe, K., 2009. A framework for modeling interdependencies in Japan’s critical infrastructures. IFIP Adv. Inf. Commun. Technol. 311, 243–257. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04798-5_17

Brown, C., Milke, M., Seville, E., 2011. Disaster waste management: A review article. Waste Manag. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2011.01.027

Brown, C., Milke, M., Seville, E., 2010. Waste Management as a “Lifeline”? A New Zealand Case Study Analysis. Int. J. Disaster Resil. Built Environ. 1, 192–206. https://doi.org/10.1108/17595901011056640

Crowley, J., 2017. A measurement of the effectiveness and efficiency of pre-disaster debris management plans. Waste Manag. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2017.02.004

Gabrielli, F., Amato, A., Balducci, S., Magi Galluzzi, L., Beolchini, F., 2018. Disaster waste management in Italy: Analysis of recent case studies. Waste Manag. 71, 542–555. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2017.10.012

Lauritzen, E.K., 1998. Emergency construction waste management. Saf. Sci. 30, 45–53.

Poudel, R., Hirai, Y., Asari, M., Sakai, S. ichi, 2018. Establishment of unit generation rates of building debris in Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, after the Gorkha earthquake. J. Mater. Cycles Waste Manag. 20, 1663–1675. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10163-018-0731-8