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The article presents a study conducted to compare energy use and environmental impacts of waste incineration and recycling. It states that the study drawn from the studies regarding the impact of waste management options and it is based on several Life-cycle assessments (LCA) for waste systems. The study discusses several materials including plastic, metal, and paper. It concludes that the recycling leads to reduce energy use in comparison to energy extraction.

The pyrolysis kinetics of cellulosic uncoated printing and writing paper, which is one of the principal materials contributing to the municipal solid waste (MSW) of Taiwan, was investigated with a thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA) reaction system. The experiments were carried out in a nitrogen environment in the 450–850 K temperature range at various constant heating rates of 1, 2, and 5 K/min. The results indicated that there were two principal reactions in TGA curves as distinguished by the two significant and distinct mass changes over the experimental conditions. The pyrolysis of uncoated printing and writing paper can be adequately described by a two-reaction model. The corresponding activation energies, preexponential factors, and reaction orders were determined. The experimental results were satisfactorily fitted by the proposed chemical reaction model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A list of environmental research papers related to January 2007 issue of Journal of Environmental Engineering is presented. Names of the researchers, title of the paper with reference material are mentioned. Some of the papers of interest include "Hydrologic applications of minimal resource allocation network (MRAN) algorithm" by Amenu, G. G. and colleagues, "Higher-order moments of velocity fluctuations in an open channel flow with large bottom roughness" by Balachandar, R. and colleagues.