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Wastewater treatment plants can face serious setbacks during the overall facility life cycle, with reasons traceable back to several sources of institutional, technical, legislative and even social nature, depending on specific characteristics of each project and area. Resulting implementation delays often lead to general system failures, thus posing serious and often more generic environmental hazards. In the present work, preliminary results of a related research concerning wastewater treatment plants are presented. Critical parameters and factors affecting the technology selected and used are indicated together with the analysis and classification of dominant conditions and needs of the particular plants. The research also focuses in defining red flags and milestones on the construction and operation of wastewater treatment plants, often despite already specified operational obligations and deadlines set by EU and national legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most developing countries face particular fundamental difficulties in relation to solid waste management, which has evolved into a number of issues with continuously increasing complexity due to limited resources and increasing quantities and hazardousness, limited or conflicting information to make reliable management decisions, un-established regulatory framework, lack of realistic long-term planning, lack of proper disposal sites, etc. Several developing countries are still lacking basic infrastructure, with not all produced waste even collected by the existing systems. The present paper addresses, specifies, classifies and discusses the problems faced by developing countries on waste management, critically addresses frequently encountered mistakes, summarizes best practices, identifies peculiarities and sets the basis for locally suitable waste management solutions in developing countries. Having Millennium Development Goals as an entry point, promotion of low-technology options and implementation of projects via the Clean Development Mechanism, are also analysed in the frame of particular needs and local socio-cultural parameters, as key issues associated with rationalizing solid waste management in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social economy in the western world constitutes nowadays of social enterprises in different possible types and offers possibilities of entrepreneurship activities and employment forms for various special population groups. Addressed in this work is the activity 'solid waste recycling' and the population group 'Roma people' in Greece, focusing in the field of technology wastes from end-of-life electric and electronic equipment. The dominant, starting-point peculiarity of this activity is that it is already on-going since many years in the form of informal recycling or scavenging and that it is challenged to adjust to the contemporary needs, standards and constraints of sustainable waste management, the challenge addressing equally the particular population group, as well as the involved competent authorities and licensed entities or systems for alternative solid waste management together with a number of other stakeholders. In this paper, a historic review of informal recycling in the western world and Greece is initially presented, whereby certain comparisons with developing countries in other continents, where informal recycling is still a widely applied practice, are also performed. Focusing on the case study area and the waste fraction of WEEE, a SWOT analysis and of a new social enterprise presented and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]