Faculty awarded NSF grant to study transboundary hazardous waste trade

SarahRobMorganFaculty members Sarah A. Moore, Robert Roth and Morgan Robertson were awarded $400,000 by the National Science Foundation’s Geography and Spatial Sciences program to study “Transboundary Flows of Hazardous Waste in North America”. This project is the first of its kind to analyze flows of waste to and from specific sub-national locales throughout Canada, Mexico and the United States.

The project provides novel methodologies and transboundary waste trade vizconceptualizations for understanding the transboundary trade in hazardous waste, in part by creating a dataset that documents site-to-site transactions between localities within North America. The data and geovisualization tools will be made available to policy makers, community members and regulators to aid in the responsible management of the trade in hazardous materials.

Geography graduate students Eric Nost and Kristen Vincent, hired as project assistants on the initiative, have worked closely with these faculty collaborators to create and geovisualize the novel dataset. Check out their interactive tool in progress at hazmatmapper.github.io.

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Author: Geography Staff