Dr. Tom Higgins is one of the early founders and shapers of waste minimization and pollution prevention. He is a frequently invited speaker at technical conferences, company workshops, and board of directors to talk about Pollution Prevention. He has assisted companies and governmental agencies in setting up Pollution Prevention programs in the US, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Canada, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Uzbekistan, Taiwan, Mainland China, Australia, and Brazil.
Higgins, Sachdev, and Engleman are environmental engineers with a career-long mission to control hazardous waste by minimizing waste releases rather than just treating wastes. The existing Toxics Release Inventory program (TRI) requires reporting release of chemicals as poundage, with no regard for risk factors. ... truly effective waste reduction programs require application of additional factors, including toxicity factors, air/water mobility factors, environmental persistence, and bioconcentration. Integration of all of these factors with the poundage released yields meaningful relative impact data or effective toxicity factors. This book provides tables of all of these data for hundreds of reportable chemicals. The authors also describe TRI programs for foreign countries, pollution prevention and waste reduction programs for eight states, and program costs. An appendix provides lists of chemicals with their CAS Registry Numbers. Valuable for safety and environmental engineers, toxicologists, ecologists, those in environmental policy positions, legislators, journalists, and the concerned public, as well as students in the relevant disciplines. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above; general audiences. --R.E. Buntrock, formerly University of Maine, in CHOICE, June 2011, Vol. 48, No. 10