Social evaluation of municipal solid waste management systems from a life cycle perspective: a systematic literature review

Purpose

The social aspects of municipal solid waste management (MSWM) systems are underpinning their sustainability and effectiveness. The assessment of these systems from a life cycle perspective is widespread throughout environmental life cycle assessment (LCA), but few studies have used social life cycle assessment (S-LCA). The present study is an innovative review with the objective to analyse and describe the current level of development of S-LCA applications in MSWM, and to identify the main methodological challenges and best practices, aiming at recommending approaches to harmonise future S-LCA applications in MSWM.

Materials and methods

A systematic review of the literature found 36 relevant scientific articles. These were submitted to bibliometric and content analysis, which includes an analysis of how methodological aspects of the four phases of S-LCA were applied in comparison with best practice and existing guidelines.

Results and discussion

There was a predominance of case studies in developing countries (59%) and evaluation of the stages of collection/transportation, pre-processing (sorting) and landfilling (55%). There were more studies focusing on stakeholders, “workers” and “local communities” and in the impact subcategories “employment”, “working hours”, “health and safety/working conditions”, “community involvement/participation” and “health and safety/living conditions of community”. There was great variability in the application of the method (47% of the studies included methodological developments). However, the 39% based on UNEP guidelines were closer to a methodological consensus.

Conclusion

In general, studies need more detail and clarity in describing the methodological decisions used. Improvements are needed for issues that limit the S-LCA method, including the difficulties of covering the entire life cycle, relating impacts to the functional unit, standardizing impact assessment methods, addressing allocation and data quality issues and interpretation of results and their limitations. Improvements can be achieved by using participatory methods in the selection of categories, subcategories and impact indicators, as well as by clarifying the definition of a product system and detailing “cut-off criteria” of processes/organizations and the impact of these decisions on results.

     

Cross-Cultural aspects of bereavement. II: Ethnic and cultural variations in the development of bereavement practices

Despite a growing interest in bereavement in cross-cultural perspective, few reports have described a comparative analysis of bereavement. By examining the social contexts in the transformations of Western bereavement practices, structures common to bereavement in a range of cultures can be identified. The paper compares the contemporary bereavement practices of several ethnic and cultural groups in North America: Blacks; ethnic Chinese; Southeast Asian refugees; Haitians; Italians; Greeks; and Spanish-speaking groups. Consideration is given to the state of widowhood in different cultural systems. The impact of modernization among traditional societies demonstrates that even though Western technologies are incorporated into the procedures followed by these modernizing societies, the deep cultural code remains intact. Five questions require further clarification: is bereavement an illness, or a rite de passage and a normal life event? How widespread and useful are protective factors, such as group support, that facilitate successful resolution of grief? How effective are mourning practices of various ethnic groups in preventing “bad grief”, and might some of these practices be beneficial if taken up by other ethnic groups? How can the Western health practitioner know that a bereaved person from an unfamiliar cultural group is suffering “bad grief”? How acceptable is Western grief counseling to non-Western clients?     

WEIGHTING HEALTH STATES AND STRONG EVALUATION*

The problem of public consultation over the allocation of health care resources is addressed by considering the role that quality of life measures, such as QALYs and the Nottingham Health Profile, could play. Such measures are typically grounded in social surveys, and as such may reflect public preferences for health care priorities. Using Charles Taylor's concepts of “weak” and “strong” evaluation, it is suggested that current quality of life measures are inadequate, insofar as they typically presuppose that survey respondents are mere “weak evaluators”, who express only inarticulate preferences. Respondents may, conversely, be understood as strong evaluators, with deeper visions of human nature and the good life informing their health preferences. Space is then created for such respondents to be asked to defend their preferences, and so be encouraged to reflect critically and publicly on the beliefs and prejudices that ground their view of health care priorities.     

Sperm competition,sexual selection and the diverse reproductive biology of Osteoglossiformes

Osteoglossiformes are an order of “bony tongue” fish considered the most primitive living order of teleosts. This review seeks to consolidate known hypotheses and identify gaps in the literature regarding the adaptive significance of diverse reproductive traits and behaviour of osteoglossiforms within the context of sperm competition and the wider lens of sexual selection. Many of the unusual traits observed in osteoglossiforms indicate low levels of sperm competition; most species have unpaired gonads, and mormyroids are the only known vertebrate species with aflagellate sperm. Several osteoglossiform families have reproductive anatomy associated with internal fertilization but perform external fertilization, which may be representative of the evolutionary transition from external to internal fertilization and putative trade-offs between sperm competition and the environment. They also employ every type of parental care seen in vertebrates. Geographically widespread and basally situated within teleosts, osteoglossiforms present an effective study system for understanding how sperm competition and sexual selection have shaped the evolution of teleost reproductive behaviour, sperm and gonad morphology, fertilization strategies, courtship and paternal care, and sexual conflict. The authors suggest that the patterns seen in osteoglossiform reproduction are a microcosm of teleost reproductive diversity, potentially signifying the genetic plasticity that contributed to the adaptive radiation of teleost fishes.     

Disability and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Depression</Emphasis>

Here, Ann Cvetkovich, interviewed by Abby Wilkerson, brings Cvetkovich’s influential cultural studies analysis of depression explicitly into conversation with disability studies. Cvetkovich understands “feeling bad” (a term she prefers to “depression”) as a defining affective state under neoliberalism. Drawing on a distinctive historical/cultural archive, she challenges the atomism of the neoliberal medical model that frames depression and affective distress more generally as the result of faulty brain chemistry—individual organisms gone awry. Instead, she traces these common experiences to sociopolitical phenomena ranging from current neoliberal demands for productivity as exemplified in university life, to histories of colonization, slavery, and displacement. The conversation considers the value of disability frameworks for understanding mental health diagnoses and the intersections of social institutions, bodily practices, and everyday affective life.     

Claiming space for an engaged anthropology: spatial inequality and social exclusion

I use the concept of “engaged anthropology” to frame a discussion of how “spatializing culture” uncovers systems of exclusion that are hidden or naturalized and thus rendered invisible to other methodological approaches. “Claiming Space for an Engaged Anthropology” is doubly meant: to claim more intellectual and professional space for engagement and to propose that anthropology include the dimension of space as a theoretical construct. I draw on three fieldwork examples to illustrate the value of the approach: (1) a Spanish American plaza, reclaimed from a Eurocentric past, for indigenous groups and contemporary cultural interpretation; (2) Moore Street Market, an enclosed Latino food market in Brooklyn, New York, reclaimed for a translocal set of social relations rather than a gentrified redevelopment project; (3) gated communities in Texas and New York and cooperatives in New York, reclaiming public space and confronting race and class segregation created by neoliberal enclosure and securitization.     

Behavioural ecology in traditional societies

Can models from behavioural ecology explain cultural diversity in human populations? Studies of variation in reproductive and productive behaviour, both within and between traditional societies, are beginning to show that specific predictions from sexual selection and optimal foraging theory can be developed and tested with human data. Greatest success has been in the study of foraging; whereas attempts to understand patterns of marriage and parental investment have been most convincing in those cases where behaviour is related to specific ecological and social conditions. The aim of human behavioural ecologists in the future will be to determine the constraints that the dual goals of reproduction and production place on individuals.     

Testing the reproductive and somatic trade‐off in female Columbian ground squirrels

Energetic trade‐offs in resource allocation form the basis of life‐history theory, which predicts that reproductive allocation in a given season should negatively affect future reproduction or individual survival. We examined how allocation of resources differed between successful and unsuccessful breeding female Columbian ground squirrels to discern any effects of resource allocation on reproductive and somatic efforts. We compared the survival rates, subsequent reprodction, and mass gain of successful breeders (females that successfully weaned young) and unsuccessful breeders (females that failed to give birth or wean young) and investigated “carryover” effects to the next year. Starting capital was an important factor influencing whether successful reproduction was initiated or not, as females with the lowest spring emergence masses did not give birth to a litter in that year. Females that were successful and unsuccessful at breeding in one year, however, were equally likely to be successful breeders in the next year and at very similar litter sizes. Although successful and unsuccessful breeding females showed no difference in over winter survival, females that failed to wean a litter gained additional mass during the season when they failed. The next year, those females had increased energy “capital” in the spring, leading to larger litter sizes. Columbian ground squirrels appear to act as income breeders that also rely on stored capital to increase their propensity for future reproduction. Failed breeders in one year “prepare” for future reproduction by accumulating additional mass, which is “carried over” to the subsequent reproductive season.     

Ethics and Epistemology in Big Data Research

Biomedical innovation and translation are increasingly emphasizing research using “big data.” The hope is that big data methods will both speed up research and make its results more applicable to “real-world” patients and health services. While big data research has been embraced by scientists, politicians, industry, and the public, numerous ethical, organizational, and technical/methodological concerns have also been raised. With respect to technical and methodological concerns, there is a view that these will be resolved through sophisticated information technologies, predictive algorithms, and data analysis techniques. While such advances will likely go some way towards resolving technical and methodological issues, we believe that the epistemological issues raised by big data research have important ethical implications and raise questions about the very possibility of big data research achieving its goals.     

Social Identity and Culture Change on the Southern Northwest Coast

Driven by the participation of Native American people in the contemporary political, cultural, and academic landscape of North America, public and academic discussions have considered the nature of contemporary American Indian identity and the persistence, survival, and (to some) reinvention of Native American cultures and traditions. I use a case study—the historical anthropology of the Native American people of the Oregon coast—to examine the persistence of many American Indian people through the colonial period and the subsequent revitalization of "traditional" cultural practices. Drawing on archaeological data, ethnohistorical accounts, and oral traditions, I offer a reading of how, set against and through an ancestral landscape, traditional social identities and relationships of gender and authority were constructed and contested. I then consider how American Indian people negotiated the new sets of social relationships dictated by the dominant society.     

Conceiving silence: infertility as discursive contradiction in Ireland

This article examines the production and reproduction of silence around infertility in Ireland. Based on narratives collected during 18 months of fieldwork, this article locates the contradictory role of silence in both the private experiences of individuals faced with a difficulty conceiving and in institutions constituted as mechanisms of public support. For many people who experience infertility, silence is rooted in the social stigma associated with reproductive failure or sexual inadequacy. Silence protects privacy while at the same time foreclosing both challenges to assumptions that fertility is the norm and any counterdiscourse to the heteronormative, profamily society in Ireland. I show how the reproduction of silence about infertility is a legacy of Ireland's history, reproductive politics, and the cultural idiom of choice. I argue that support networks and Internet bulletin boards on websites create opportunities to dialogue in silence, reproducing isolation rather than creating public discourse.     

THE ROLES OF LIFE‐HISTORY SELECTION AND SEXUAL SELECTION IN THE ADAPTIVE EVOLUTION OF MATING BEHAVIOR IN A BEETLE

Although there is continuing debate about whether sexual selection promotes or impedes adaptation to novel environments, the role of mating behavior in such adaptation remains largely unexplored. We investigated the evolution of mating behavior (latency to mating, mating probability and duration) in replicate populations of seed beetles Callosobruchus maculatus subjected to selection on life‐history (“Young” vs. “Old” reproduction) under contrasting regimes of sexual selection (“Monogamy” vs. “Polygamy”). Life‐history selection is predicted to favor delayed mating in “Old” females, but sexual conflict under polygamy can potentially retard adaptive life‐history evolution. We found that life‐history selection yielded the predicted changes in mating behavior, but sexual selection regime had no net effect. In within‐line crosses, populations selected for late reproduction showed equally reduced early‐life mating probability regardless of mating system. In between‐line crosses, however, the effect of life‐history selection on early‐life mating probability was stronger in polygamous lines than in monogamous ones. Thus, although mating system influenced male–female coevolution, removal of sexual selection did not affect the adaptive evolution of mating behavior. Importantly, our study shows that the interaction between sexual selection and life‐history selection can result in either increased or decreased reproductive divergence depending on the ecological context.     

Homicide and cultural evolution

Homicide rates are suitable materials for the study of “cultural evolution,” because they vary dramatically between societies (hence, are “cultural”) and change gradually rather than saccadically (hence, “evolve”).Sociological models of the sources of variation in homicide rates (“subcultures of violence”; demographic change; “legitimation of violence”; mass media effects) are criticized for inattention to the social context of violence and to the individual motives of the protagonists. Models of culture change that emphasize “transmission” are criticized for treating the culture-bearing person as a passive vessel rather than an active strategist. A satisfactory theory of the “cultural evolution” of violence awaits satisfactory theories of how people apprehend their interests and how they pursue them.     

Anthropology and psychiatry

In this paper anthropology and psychiatry are defined as well as their scientific area, their methods and research objectives; the high level of their mutual thematic and methodological complementarity has been emphasized. The sociocultural factors which are inherent in the area of cultural anthropology can affect mental health in a number of ways: by forming a certain personality type that is predisposed for a certain type of disorder, by an education model which increases the frequency of some disorders, by criticism and sanctions of a certain behaviour that is actually desirable from the point of view of mental health preservation, by supporting and rewarding a behaviour model that is harmful for mental health; by its complexity and, in some of the segments, by mutual contradictions they can cause mental disorders; by forming symptoms of mental disorders i.e. by a pathoplastic action through which they become an area of scientific interest of cultural psychiatry. Anthropology directs psychiatry towards creating preventive and therapeutic programs that accept the mutual influence and interconnectedness of socio-cultural conditions and the mental health status.     

“Pensando Mucho” (“Thinking Too Much”): Embodied Distress Among Grandmothers in Nicaraguan Transnational Families

In this paper, I describe an embodied form of emotional distress expressed by Nicaraguan grandmothers caring for children of migrant mothers, “pensando mucho” (“thinking too much”). I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured exploratory interviews about pensando mucho conducted with grandmother heads-of-household to show the cultural significance of this complaint within the context of women’s social roles as caregivers in transnational families. Adopting an interpretive and meaning-centered approach, I analyze the cultural significance of pensando mucho as expressed through women’s narratives about the impacts of mother outmigration on their personal and family lives. I show how women use pensando mucho to express the moral ambivalence of economic remittances and the uncertainty surrounding migration, particularly given cultural values for “unity” and “solidarity” in Nicaraguan family life. I also discuss the relationship between pensando mucho and dolor de cerebro (“brainache”) as a way of documenting the relationship between body/mind, emotional distress, and somatic suffering. The findings presented here suggest that further research on “thinking too much” is needed to assess whether this idiom is used by women of the grandmother generation in other cultural contexts to express embodied distress in relation to broader social transformations.     

Reproduction humaine: le point de vue du philosophe

This article discusses and essential aspect of the link between ethics and life, as expressed in the concept of bioethics. It discusses the various issues related to human reproduction from “the philosopher’s point of view”. This discussion is limited to the principles of this field. The author starts by justifying a philosophical approach to ethical problems in the context of medicine in general and reproduction in particular, a field which specialists, theoreticians or practitioners of medicine and legal medicine in particular, appear to have ignored. This leads to a discussion of the human aspects of reproduction, from questions concerning the nature of living beings (individuals and species) to the relationship between nature and culture (symbol and freedom). Although man “reproduces” and “procreates”, he is also technically able to “produce himself”. This shift from biological reproduction to procreation must take into account problems related to technological science in medicine (technical control of living material and so-called “neutrality” of the technique). The main bioethical issues involving an ethics of decision-making in the field of human reproduction (contraception, abortion, status of the embryo, medically-assisted procreation, desire to master the “form” of the “reproduced” human, or even the “product”, cloning) are then discussed. Finally, the author proposes elements of a “philosophy of point of view”, requiring responsibility for each decision in the context of an “ethics of discussion”.     

Ant reproductive strategies

In contrast to what is generally believed, the reproductive strategies of ants are remarkably diverse and include such different phenomena, as wingless female and male sexuals, reproduction by mated workers, thelytokous parthenogenesis, and complete workerlessness. We review the various reproductive life histories and investigate them in the light of recent models on the evolution of dispersal strategies and multiple-queening. It appears that most deviations from “normal” colony propagation can be explained by a decreased success of dispersal and solitary founding by solitary queens in certain types of habitats. Consequently, alternative reproductive strategies are found especially in those species, in which environmental conditions or a highly specialized way of life are thought to make solitary founding costly. Among the key factors, which determine the success of reproductive strategies, appear to be spatial and temporal distribution of habitats and the availability of nest sites.     

Reproductive state affects reliance on public information in sticklebacks

The degree to which animals use public and private sources of information has important implications for research in both evolutionary ecology and cultural evolution. While researchers are increasingly interested in the factors that lead individuals to vary in the manner in which they use different sources of information, to date little is known about how an animal''s reproductive state might affect its reliance on social learning. Here, we provide experimental evidence that in foraging ninespine sticklebacks (Pungitius pungitius), gravid females increase their reliance on public information generated by feeding demonstrators in choosing the richer of two prey patches than non-reproductive fish, while, in contrast, reproductive males stop using public information. Subsequent experiments revealed reproductive males to be more efficient asocial foragers, less risk-averse and generally less social than both reproductive females and non-reproductives. These findings are suggestive of adaptive switches in reliance on social and asocial sources of information with reproductive condition, and we discuss the differing costs of reproduction and the proximate mechanisms that may underlie these differences in information use. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of adaptive foraging strategies in animals and for understanding the way information diffuses through populations.     

Queen–worker ratio affects reproductive skew in a socially polymorphic ant

The partitioning of reproduction among individuals in communally breeding animals varies greatly among species, from the monopolization of reproduction (high reproductive skew) to similar contribution to the offspring in others (low skew). Reproductive skew models explain how relatedness or ecological constraints affect the magnitude of reproductive skew. They typically assume that individuals are capable of flexibly reacting to social and environmental changes. Most models predict a decrease of skew when benefits of staying in the group are reduced. In the ant Leptothorax acervorum, queens in colonies from marginal habitats form dominance hierarchies and only the top‐ranking queen lays eggs (“functional monogyny”). In contrast, queens in colonies from extended coniferous forests throughout the Palaearctic rarely interact aggressively and all lay eggs (“polygyny”). An experimental increase of queen:worker ratios in colonies from low‐skew populations elicits queen–queen aggression similar to that in functionally monogynous populations. Here, we show that this manipulation also results in increased reproductive inequalities among queens. Queens from natural overwintering colonies differed in the number of developing oocytes in their ovaries. These differences were greatly augmented in queens from colonies with increased queen:worker ratios relative to colonies with a low queen:worker ratio. As assumed by models of reproductive skew, L. acervorum colonies thus appear to be capable of flexibly adjusting reproductive skew to social conditions, yet in the opposite way than predicted by most models.