Environmental damage compensation for illegal solid waste dumping in China

Factors influencing illegal dumping of hazardous waste in China

In recent years, illegal dumping of hazardous waste (IDHW) in China has become a recurring problem. Effective identification and exploration of the factors influencing illegal dumping are crucial for incident prevention and hazardous waste management, but its analysis has rarely been reported. Thus, this study focused on 568 cases of IDHW officially reported by the government. Through regular expressions, the categories of dumped wastes and the provinces where the incidents occurred were extracted. Furthermore, a comprehensive set of influencing factors was constructed by text mining for the case content and by the integration from the existing literature. On this basis, the unstructured and structured data were integrated using a Boolean dataset to respectively explore the association rules of influencing factors for the overall IDHW and for major waste categories, in conjunction with the extracted province information. Subsequently, a Bayesian network was constructed by utilizing the results of association rules mining and the key factors were identified through corresponding analysis. The findings of this study reveal a close connection between various influencing factors, with distinct key factors identified for different categories of hazardous waste. Among them, law-enforcement emerges as a crucial factor in most IDHW cases, while the factor of public monitoring for metallic hazardous waste and the factor of government supervision for distillation residue waste and other waste play a key role in their respective cases of illegal dumping. These findings offer a fresh research perspective for investigating the factors influencing IDHW and present helpful insights for developing effective strategies to prevent and control such incidents.

Ecological Harm and Economic Damages of Chemical Contamination to Linked Aquatic-Terrestrial Food Webs: A Study-Design Tool for Practitioners

Contamination of aquatic ecosystems can have cascading effects on terrestrial consumers by altering the availability and quality of aquatic insect prey. Comprehensive assessment of these indirect food-web effects of contaminants on natural resources and their associated services necessitates using both ecological and economic tools. In the present study we present an aquatic-terrestrial assessment tool (AT2), including ecological and economic decision trees, to aid practitioners and researchers in designing contaminant effect studies for linked aquatic-terrestrial insect-based food webs. The tool is tailored to address the development of legal claims by the US Department of the Interior's Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration Program, which aims to restore natural resources injured by oil spills and hazardous substance releases into the environment. Such cases require establishing, through scientific inquiry, the existence of natural resource injury as well as the determination of the monetary or in-kind project-based damages required to restore this injury. However, this tool is also useful to researchers interested in questions involving the effects of contaminants on linked aquatic-terrestrial food webs. Stylized cases exemplify how application of AT2 can help practitioners and researchers design studies when the contaminants present at a site are likely to lead to injury of terrestrial aerial insectivores through loss of aquatic insect prey and/or dietary contaminant exposure. Designing such studies with ecological endpoints and economic modeling inputs in mind will increase the relevance and cost-effectiveness of studies, which can in turn improve the outcomes of cases and studies involving the ecological effects of contaminants on food webs. Environ Toxicol Chem 2023;42:2029-2039. Published 2023. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of SETAC.