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Taiwan has been an active participant in waste recycling for a long period of time due to the need for resource sustainability. The country believes it can one day eventually achieve the goal of zero waste through the effective use of strategies such as source reduction, resource recovery, reuse, and recycling. Despite Taiwan's long‐standing commitment to waste recycling for purposes of resource sustainability, achieving the goal of zero waste remains an immense challenge. Therefore, putting into effect the previously mentioned strategies will obviously be necessary in order to realize this goal. However, the effective implementation of these strategies requires both comprehensive planning and coordination, particularly in large medical institutions. Here, we have aimed to promote waste reduction throughout the entire hospital system in Taiwan using 3 strategies: (1) standardizing the colors of garbage bags, marking patterns of waste, and reviewing and establishing an internal audit mechanism on a regular basis; (2) the systematic monitoring of individual departments with regard to on waste consumption, brands, and materials while linking departments to the procurement source management team. In addition, any related hardware has been upgraded, precisely controlled, and automatically uploaded to the cloud system for an improved intelligent management system. In addition, the Department of Nutrition has adjusted the handling of ingredients and consumption patterns of hospital employees in order to reduce food waste; and (3) with regard to the disposal of medical waste, medical centers will be consolidating and advancing the knowledge and ability of all hospital personnel through education and training programs established for them. After the implementation of this program to promote awareness, the ratio of biological waste percentage in regard to total hospital waste dropped from 37.3% in 2018 to 33.6% in 2022, with a 49% decrease being seen in food waste, and a 99.32% increase being realized in green designated procurement items. Such an efficient management of medical waste has no doubt been extremely beneficial to the hospital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an effort to inform interventions targeting littering behaviour, we estimate how much a change in trash-bag colour increases trash can visibility in Paris. To that end, we applied standard Signal Detection techniques to test how much changing trash-bag colour affects subjects' trash can detection rates. In three pre-registered studies, we found that changing trash bag colour from grey to either red, green or blue considerably increases the perception of bins in British (tourist) and Parisian (resident) samples. We found that changing the bag colour from grey to blue increased visibility the most. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ongoing management and research interest in dog-related issues at recreation areas necessitates examining support for relevant management strategies among different visitor groups. Using data collected from an onsite survey of nonadjacent visitors (n=1,257) and a household mail survey of visitors who live adjacent (n=74) to a multiple-use recreation area (referred to as the Forests) in Oregon, we compare visitation characteristics and attitudes about dog-related management strategies among these two visitor groups. Nearly half of all respondents reported bringing dogs with them. Overall, respondents supported providing more dog waste bags and trash cans and requiring leashes in busy areas. They opposed requiring leashes everywhere. Compared to nonadjacent respondents, adjacent respondents have been recreating at the Forests longer, used stricter leash behavior with their dogs, and supported stricter leash regulations and increased enforcement of regulations. However, effect sizes for these statistically significant differences were small. Thus, communication and management strategies that aim to mitigate unwanted impacts from dogs may not need to be targeted uniquely to adjacent visitors compared to those who travel to the Forests. We discuss other pertinent management and communication implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even if I already know that I p i , I might want to confirm that I p i , verify that I p i , double check that I p i , make sure that I p i , or corroborate that I p i .[17] Falbo ([4]) and Woodard (2022) make the case that inquiry aims, not just at knowledge, but at epistemic improvement more generally. After all, if further inquiry and knowledge are perfectly consistent, then an activity like checking that I p i might also be compatible with knowing that I p i , leaving us once again without an explanation for why those who check whether I p i might think that they do not know that I p i . Friedman (2017), (2019a), and (2019b) discusses both (III) and (IV), holding that inquiring whether I p i requires suspending on I p i and that believing I p i and simultaneously suspending on I p i is irrational. In his recent book, I Knowing and Checking i , Guido Melchior sets out to explain a number of puzzles about knowledge via an analysis of checking. [Extracted from the article]

Environmental persistence is one of the few shortcomings of plastic materials. As a consequence, alternative plastics labeled as compostable are replacing polyolefins in some commercial applications, such as food bags and trash bags. A rapid, high-throughput, and environmentally relevant method to assess the potential biodegradability in marine conditions is used to assess these materials already on the market, as well as novel bio-based polymers still in development. By fitting experimental data to a non-linear logistic model, ultimate biodegradability can be calculated without regard for incubation time. Whereas the commercial products show negligible or very low marine biodegradability, one of the novel materials exceeds the 20% biodegradation threshold relative to fully marine biodegradable PHB after 28 days. In addition, the sensitivity of the method can be enhanced and its duration reduced, at the expense of labor-demanding preconditioning of the microbial inoculum, by increasing the bacterial density in the incubation vessels. In contrast, pre-exposure of the inoculum to plastic, either in laboratory or field conditions, does not enhance the performance of the test. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study investigates the ways in which Muslim minority youth experience Islamophobia in south-west Sydney primary schools. Islamophobia has occupied the Australian discursive context since the September 11 attacks and the ensuing War on Terror in 2001, and was amplified in the recent decade following the rise of Daesh and events of home-grown terrorism. In schools, minority Muslim students in Australia have been considered a problem for some time. Since the early phases of migration in the 1970s, Muslims have been constructed as a pedagogical challenge. More recently, this has adopted political overtones, and concerns regarding educational attainment have moved towards issues of national security and socio-political integration. To understand the ways in which the wider discursive context filters to schools, the study is underpinned by critical theory, combined with a critical ethnographic case study methodology. Drawing on the voices of Muslim students aged 10–12 across three schools, the critical discourse analysis found that Islamophobia was experienced by Muslim students in primary schools drawing on visible and physical cultural markers of being Muslim including the Arabic language, the hijab and Islamic practices. This paper contends that Islamophobia should be formally recognised as a form of cultural racism in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organic waste is both a refuse and a resource. Focusing on household waste in a city in Western Switzerland, this study examines the practices of waste segregation in relation to the city's (organic) waste management system. Based on qualitative research with diverse households and experts in waste management, we use social practice theory to discuss the meanings and materiality of household organic waste segregation. We show how more or less visible meanings, tied up with material arrangements, can be either enablers or deterrents for such forms of waste management. The article argues that certain aspects of the waste system could be rendered more visible, such as the proper labelling of collection bins, while less visibility could be given to certain meanings around waste segregation, such as the financial cost of not sorting. We also discuss how organic waste sorting, as a practice, contests the dominant understandings of change based on technological efficiency, economic benefits, and individual changes. More collective forms of change are needed, working at the level of social contexts and materiality, to further support organic waste sorting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Economic and social progress in the Republic of Korea resulted in an increased standard of living, which subsequently produced more waste. The Korean government implemented a volume-based trash disposal system that may modify waste disposal characteristics to handle vast volumes of waste efficiently. However, the inconvenience of having to purchase standard garbage bags on one's own led to passive participation by citizens and instances of illegally dumping waste in non-standard plastic bags. As a result, there is a need for the development of automatic detection and reporting of illegal acts of garbage dumping. To achieve this, we suggest a system for tracking unlawful rubbish disposal that is based on deep neural networks. The proposed monitoring approach obtains the articulation points (joints) of a dumper through OpenPose and identifies the type of garbage bag through the object detection model, You Only Look Once (YOLO), to determine the distance of the dumper's wrist to the garbage bag and decide whether it is illegal dumping. Additionally, we introduced a method of tracking the IDs issued to the waste bags using the multi-object tracking (MOT) model to reduce the false detection of illegal dumping. To evaluate the efficacy of the proposed illegal dumping monitoring system, we compared it with the other systems based on behavior recognition. As a result, it was validated that the suggested approach had a higher degree of accuracy and a lower percentage of false alarms, making it useful for a variety of upcoming applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of global consumption growth, the amount of household waste is increasing, the management of which should be based on the choice of those methods that ensure the growth of its processing and do not increase the financial burden on the population. This study examines the most common methods of organizing the management of solid domestic waste and the formation of tariffs for its disposal in the Netherlands. The effect of the applied method on the composition of the generated waste and the degree of separation of their components is analyzed. The cost of handling each ton of waste using each of the three most common methods is calculated. The different influence of the method of payment for household waste management on the volume of mixed waste generation per capita and the volume of waste generation in general has been proven. The largest volumes of mixed waste were generated in those municipalities that introduced an annual fee per inhabitant. The smallest are when using payment by the volume of the garbage bag. Depending on the method used in determining the payment for household waste management, the financial burden per tenant is calculated. In municipalities that have implemented a fixed fee for waste disposal per inhabitant, the load was 1.04 % of the annual income of the person, and when paying depending on the volume of garbage bags, 4.65 %. It is established that the existing waste management system in the Netherlands has ensured a high level of organization of separate collection of household waste. As a result of the study, no direct relationship was found between the method of calculating payment for waste disposal and the generation of mixed waste. It is concluded that the effectiveness of the implementation of the household waste management policy depends on the level of public awareness of the negative consequences of its impact on the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents research on how household waste is collected. An online survey, with 348 participants, from the Romanian region of Bacau, was conducted from October 2018 to May 2019. The online questionnaire included a set of over 40 questions, some with the aim of identifying the nature of the people participating, but most of the questions being designed to determine the collection methods for household waste. The major goal of the current study, as previously stated, was to determine the primary way of collecting household garbage from the public, while also learning various details about the participants, including their residence location, gender, age, and level of education. Referring to the means used for collecting household waste, the following items were noted: trash cans, cardboard boxes, dumpsters, and raffia bags. As a result of the study carried out, the following conclusions were drawn: it was noticed that 70 percent of those who participated in the survey came from urban areas; a larger percentage of female respondents took part in the survey (128 from 348); the majority of respondents were aged 18–29 (182); 178 respondents had a higher education level; collection of household waste in garbage bags represented 62.9 percent of the total collection methods. Following statistical processing of the data, and an overview of the main ways in which household waste was collected, a number of connections were found between the characteristics of the respondents and their household waste collection. What is noteworthy is that the characteristics of the respondents could be grouped into cumulative factors that played an important role in household waste collection: the first group formed by level of education and location of the respondents, and the second group formed by age and gender of the respondents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the unintended consequences of carryout grocery bag (CGB) regulations by looking at the impact on sales of alternative plastic bag products. We extend the literature by studying two types of CGB regulations, bag bans and bag fees. Using retail scanner data and employing a general synthetic control method, we find that both types of CGB regulations are associated with significantly higher plastic trash bag sales. We estimate that CGB regulations lead to an average increase in purchased plastics of 127 pounds per store per month, ranging from 30 to 135 (37–224) pounds for 4-gallon (8-gallon) trash bags. These results confirm previous findings on bag bans and provide new evidence on bag fees. In general, the effects do not differ across CGB regulations, but some heterogeneity exists. Our results highlight unintentional spillover effects of narrowly targeted policies on other unregulated waste. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The modern world in the present era made life miserable due to extensive usage of plastic. Low-density polyethylene (LDPE) is widely consumed in every part of the world starting from baby products to garbage bags. Humans and animals are affected due to the usage and disposal of LDPE in the environment. To safeguard the environment from deleterious effects, biodegradation of LDPE was studied by isolating a potent Streptomyces werraensis SDJM strain from garbage soil. The degradation assessment was performed to identify the LDPE degraded compounds such as octane, decane, tetracosane, hexacosane, dotriacontene, tetratiacontene, tridecone, tetracontane, and pentacosane, using a sophisticated technique - liquid chromatography-mass spectroscopy (LCMS). The end product of LDPE biodegradation, carbon dioxide was measured by the GCMS-SPME technique. Field trials in garbage soil for a period of three months reveal 71.26% weight loss compared to laboratory test results where the weight loss was 60.05%. The morphological changes and structural changes of the polymer in fields were assessed by SEM analysis and FTIR analysis after one month of incubation. The test results in field trials were promising and convincing to overcome the LDPE pollution in presence of S.werraensis SDJM strain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In several "short live" packaging applications, plastic gloves, plays an important role. Garbage bags and toys are the majority of waste plastic. For their constancy in our landscape, incorrectly discarded plastic products are a major pollutant to the environment, potentially life-damaging. One of most troublesome plastic in this regard, between synthetic plastics Polyethylene (PE) is Polyethylene waste typically exists in the lack of adequate treatment methods burned that cause's severe air pollution. Polyethylene found inert can be biodegraded, if necessary the strains of microbial are used. In this research plastic degradation was analyzed by 30 days inoculation in broth culture method. The bacterial species obtained associated with degrading plastic were identified as Streptococcus pyrogen. The efficacy of plastic degradation as evaluated in broth culture method. The work illustrated that mutated Streptococcus pyrogen have grater tendency to degrade the plastic when compared with wild Streptococcus pyrogen in optimized media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The trash disposal system, using standard trash bags, has been adopted by the government of the Republic of Korea (ROK) for more than two decades. This has caused a sanitary problem, as well as some secondary pollution. It is possible to solve this problem by deploying more manpower, but considering the manpower and maintenance costs that impose a heavy burden on the local governments who are experiencing tight financial situations, it would not be feasible. Thus, an Internet of Things (IoT)-based Smart Trash Separation Bin model that can reduce the cost of trash separation work has been proposed in this paper. The three efficient designs that respectively use a sensor, image processing, or spectroscope technology are presented. These IoT-based designs can bring significant merit to reducing the manpower costs, as well as the administrative cost involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A novel method for classifying the presence of glass and metal in trash bags. • An ablation study was performed to find suitable sensors. • Sound and metal detection were used as input for a convolutional neural network. • Accuracies of the CNN models were up to 98%. • Support for detecting consumer waste sorting quality during waste collection. We present a proof-of-concept method to classify the presence of glass and metal in consumer trash bags. With the prevalent utilization of waste collection trucks in municipal solid waste management, the aim of this method is to help pinpoint the locations where waste sorting quality is below accepted standards, making it possible and more efficient to develop tailored procedures that can improve the waste sorting quality in areas with the most urgent needs. Using trash bags containing various amounts of glass and metal, in addition to common waste found in households, we use a combination of sound recording and a beat-frequency oscillation metal detector as inputs to a machine learning algorithm to identify the occurrence of glass and metal in trash bags. A custom-built test rig was developed to mimic a real waste collection truck, which was used to test different sensors and build the datasets. Convolutional neural networks were trained for the classification task, achieving accuracies of up to 98%. These promising results support this method's potential implementation in real waste collection trucks, enabling location-specific and long-term monitoring of consumer waste sorting quality, which can provide decision support for waste management systems, and research on consumer behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• 76 drivers supervised automation, for 30 min, in a Wizard-of-Oz test-track study. • A conflict object was revealed by a lead-vehicle cut-out and not sensed by automation. • A hands-on-wheel requirement did not influence driver conflict response. • High trust in automation and crashing were associated with a delayed response. • Low trust in automation was associated with an appropriate driver response. Securing appropriate driver responses to conflicts is essential in automation that is not perfect (because the driver is needed as a fall-back for system limitations and failures). However, this is recognized as a major challenge in the human factors literature. Moreover, in-depth knowledge is lacking regarding mechanisms affecting the driver response process. The first aim of this study was to investigate how driver conflict response while using highly reliable (but not perfect) supervised automation differ for drivers that (a) crash or avoid a conflict object and (b) report high trust or low trust in automation to avoid the conflict object. The second aim was to understand the influence on the driver conflict response of two specific factors: a hands-on-wheel requirement (with vs. without), and the conflict object type (garbage bag vs. stationary vehicle). Seventy-six participants drove with highly reliable but supervised automation for 30 min on a test track. Thereafter they needed to avoid a static object that was revealed by a lead-vehicle cut-out. The driver conflict response was assessed through the response process : timepoints for driver surprise reaction, hands-on-wheel, driver steering, and driver braking. Crashers generally responded later in all actions of the response process compared to non-crashers. In fact, some crashers collided with the conflict object without even putting their hands on the wheel. Driver conflict response was independent of the hands-on-wheel requirement. High-trust drivers generally responded later than the low-trust drivers or not at all, and only high trust drivers crashed. The larger stationary vehicle triggered an earlier surprise reaction compared to the garbage bag, while hands-on-wheel and steering response were similar for the two conflict object types. To conclude, crashing is associated with a delay in all actions of the response process. In addition, driver conflict response does not change with a hands-on-wheel requirement but changes with trust-level and conflict object type. Simply holding the hands on the wheel is not sufficient to prevent collisions or elicit earlier responses. High trust in automation is associated with late response and crashing, whereas low trust is associated with appropriate driver response. A larger conflict object trigger earlier surprise reactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban sprawl represents one of the most critical threats to biodiversity leading to the decline of rare and specialist species and the proliferation of a few dominant generalist ones. Among the winners there is the yellow-legged gull, Larus michahellis, which has recently colonised towns, nesting on the roofs of buildings and feeding on urban waste by spreading the contents of garbage bags on the streets. This situation has been recently documented in the historic centre of Venice (Italy) where it led to negative environmental impact and serious consequences in terms of urban hygiene. To counter such problems, the public company responsible for managing the urban waste in the Venice municipality established a new waste collection policy in the city to prevent accumulation of rubbish in the streets and limit the amount of trophic resources available for the species. We performed a monitoring program of the urban population of yellow-legged gulls and used generalized linear models to investigate the effectiveness of the new waste collection system on reducing the amount of waste in the streets and its effect on the target species. Results revealed a statistically significant positive correlation between urban waste and gulls and a significant effect of the new policy in lowering these two variables. Open areas, strongly frequented, with food and beverage vendors and illegal dumps were also highlighted as the main contributors to the presence of yellow-legged gulls. Such information can be used by local authorities to plan specific interventions to reduce the attractiveness of the city to gulls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phantom Limb Company's performance, Falling Out, examines the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, Japan. The University of Utah will present the work in 2020, as part of an ongoing collaboration between the University's multidisciplinary presenter, sustainability office and an interdisciplinary faculty research centre. Timothy Morton states '...there is no "away" after the end of the world. It would make more sense to design in a dark ecological way, admitting our coexistence with toxic substances we have created and exploited'. Writing about Falling Out will serve as a record of the work's impact on the co-authors, and help grapple with our task of guardianship of the toxic world we have created for a future we cannot predict. Under the headings 1) Nature, 2) Body and 3) Time we consider ways that the work designs many bodies' coexistence with the toxic substances humans have created. In Nature, we introduce risk through questions of natural hazard resilience and representation. In Body, we use Mel Y. Chen's work on animacies and environmental justice scholarship on Fukushima to describe the entanglement of the puppet, human, human projected and garbage bag bodies in the work. In Time, we conclude with Amitav Ghosh's ideas of the uncanny to consider the cascading effects of the moment that strain in Earth's crust reached the critical breaking point and the weight of the entire ocean propelled to land with the tsunami to the moment in an imagined future when the impacts of this fallout will no longer be felt. We consider how expanding our sense of time to include the millennia of geologic processes may make hope possible. On these time scales, all is renewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]