Incineration has been used widely for waste disposal, including household, hazardous, and medical wasteâ€"but there is increasing public concern over the benefits of combusting the waste versus the health risk from pollutants emitted during combustion. Waste Incineration and Public Health informs the emerging debate with the most up-to-date information available on incineration, pollution, and human healthâ€"along with expert conclusions and recommendations for further research and improvement of such areas as risk communication. The committee provides details on: Processes involved in incineration and how contaminants are released. Environmental dynamics of contaminants and routes of human exposure. Tools and approaches for assessing possible human health effects. Scientific concerns pertinent to future regulatory actions. The book also examines some of the social, psychological, and economic factors that affect the communities where incineration takes place and addresses the problem of uncertainty and variation in predicting the health effects of incineration processes.

The UNEP Governing Council of February 2013 requested the United Nations Environment Programme "to develop a global outlook of challenges, trends and policies in relation to waste prevention, minimization and management, taking into account the materials life cycle, subject to the availability of extra-budgetary resources and in consultation with Governments and stakeholders, building on available data, best practices and success stories, taking into account the Global Chemicals Outlook and any other relevant initiatives and taking care not to duplicate existing information, to provide guidance for national policy planning." UNEP's International Environmental Technology Centre (IETC), in collaboration with the International Solid Waste Association (ISWA), has taken the lead on this initiative; aiming to develop the Global Waste Management Outlook as a tool to provide an authoritative overview, analysis and recommendations for action of policy instruments and financing models for waste management. The GWMO is the result of two year's work and provides the first comprehensive global overview of the state of waste management around the world in the 21st century.