The Management of the void

The project reviews the links between territory transformations and the way societies have managed their own resources. Through linking environmental pollution data visualization to current land use regulations, a 2-steps intervention on the hazardous landfill case study site is proposed: a waste confinement dome and a landscape restoration.

Industrial landscapes are nowadays privileged observatories of the way societies have managed their own resources. Inevitably, the cycle of matter and the use of natural resources as an economic activity driver involve the generation of waste that, unlike in nature, has not always been understood as a resource and reintroduced back into the cycle.\nThe society's rejection about its own remains, has brought us to hide and move them out of our cities when it has been possible. The receivers-of-waste spaces introduction to the global market has led to poorer societies to accommodate more waste of that which they by themselves generate.\nThese environmental liabilities are mainly being stored in places with lower regulations and less both technological and economic ability to treat them. In many cases, this situation ends up contaminating the environment with the consequent affection on living organisms. It is through epidemiology that we can measure the impact of the released substances to the vicinities.\nThe IPPC (Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control Law 16/2002) implementation by the EU Parliament has provided an inventory of industrial activities that require the installation of Integrated Environmental Authorisation facilities. Based on this data, the National Epidemiology Centre - Instituto de Salud Carlos III has done an epidemiological study to check out the correlation of hazardous waste disposal sites nearby to towns. \nThe main interest of the project lies in the proximity analysis to pollutants emitting facilities and the diseases suggested by epidemiological studies, through linking the consequences on the public health system to the urban planning.\nAlthough it’s difficult to account the real costs of waste management, we believe it’s important to decontaminate an area where waste hasn’t been properly managed to be able to get a closer estimation of the total cost that environmental liabilities represent to our society. \nRemediating the Can Planas landfill would return extrapolable data from an embraceable scale location while solving a likely public health threat.