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Historically, the U.S. waste collection fleet was dominated by diesel-fueled waste collection vehicles (WCVs); the growing need for sustainable waste collection has urged decision makers to incorporate economically efficient alternative fuels, while mitigating environmental impacts. The pros and cons of alternative fuels complicate the decisions making process, calling for a comprehensive study that assesses the multiple factors involved. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) methods allow decision makers to select the best alternatives with respect to selection criteria. In this study, two MCDA methods, Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and Simple Additive Weighting (SAW), were used to rank fuel alternatives for the U.S. waste collection industry with respect to a multi-level environmental and financial decision matrix. The environmental criteria consisted of life-cycle emissions, tail-pipe emissions, water footprint (WFP), and power density, while the financial criteria comprised of vehicle cost, fuel price, fuel price stability, and fueling station availability. The overall analysis showed that conventional diesel is still the best option, followed by hydraulic-hybrid WCVs, landfill gas (LFG) sourced natural gas, fossil natural gas, and biodiesel. The elimination of the WFP and power density criteria from the environmental criteria ranked biodiesel 100 (BD100) as an environmentally better alternative compared to other fossil fuels (diesel and natural gas). This result showed that considering the WFP and power density as environmental criteria can make a difference in the decision process. The elimination of the fueling station and fuel price stability criteria from the decision matrix ranked fossil natural gas second after LFG-sourced natural gas. This scenario was found to represent the status quo of the waste collection industry. A sensitivity analysis for the status quo scenario showed the overall ranking of diesel and fossil natural gas to be more sensitive to changing fuel prices as compared to other alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative negotiation has been widely used for developing water policy. Nevertheless, a serious lacuna remains in the understanding of the factors that determine whether the negotiators in this bargaining process will be able to reach agreement. This paper argues that the literature has focused on the process that is followed in negotiations, to the virtual exclusion of the substance of the issues that are to be resolved. As a consensus can only be reached concerning a change in policy if each party receives compensation for the concessions that it makes, a precondition for collaborative negotiation is that each party must have control over some asset that it can "trade" with the other parties. When this condition is met, it can be said that the process has "substance." The authors identify a number of situations in which negotiations over water policy may possess this characteristic. However, they also argue that there is a large set of cases in which positive net gains are available, but in which at least one party lacks control over an asset that can be exchanged. In these cases, a number of government policies are investigated that could provide stakeholders with the necessary tradable goods and, therefore, could impart substance to the process. Many situations still remain, however, in which collaboration will lack substance, and stakeholders can be expected either to seek alternative means for pursuing their goals or to waste their effort in endless bargaining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Cooperative game theory solutions can provide useful insights into how parties may use water and environmental resources and share any benefits of cooperation. Here, a method based on Nash and Nash–Harsanyi bargaining solutions is developed to explore the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) relicensing process, in which owners of non-federal hydropower projects in the United States have to negotiate their allowable operations, with other interest groups (mainly environmental). Linkage of games to expand the feasible solution range and the “strategic loss” concept are discussed and a FERC relicensing bargaining model is developed for studying the bargaining stage (third stage) of the relicensing process. Based on the suggested solution method, how the lack of incentive for cooperation results in long delay in FERC relicensing in practice is explained. Further, potential effects of climate change on the FERC relicensing are presented and how climate change may provide an incentive for cooperation among the parties to hasten the relicensing is discussed. An “adaptive FERC license” framework is proposed, based on cooperative game theory, to improve the performance and adaptability of the system to future changes with no cost to the FERC, in face of uncertainty about future hydrological and ecological conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]