Nigel Lawson

Industry, environment and health through 200 years in Manchester

Abstract The Manchester urban area evolved rapidly in the early 19th century from a series of small towns to a major industrial conurbation with huge material flows and worldwide trade connections. A combination of the availability of nearby coalfields, canals, and free trade, which encouraged entrepreneurial enterprise, made Manchester into the ‘shock’ city of the industrial revolution. Rapid nucleated urban growth associated with industrialisation throughout the 19th century involved an exponential growth in materials transfers and in waste flows. The 20th century suburban dispersal of residential and industrial growth led to further increase in the impact of the urban metabolism, especially in terms of mass: distance of materials movement. The current post-industrial phase in Greater Manchester has to cope with the environmental and social legacies of its industrial past and with growing per capita materials consumption and increases in number of households despite a nearly static population of around 2.5 million. Changes in material flows, land usage and river morphology in Greater Manchester over the past 200 years have reflected changing technologies, industry, economics, social expectations and environmental legislation. Manchester had the first passenger railway, the first inter-basin domestic water transfer in the UK, the first urban smokeless zones and was part of a pioneering land reclamation partnership in the 1970s. Even so, the environmental legacy of industrial material flows constantly presents new challenges, from the cost of reclaiming contaminated brownfield sites to finding destinations for todays urban waste.

Recycling construction and demolition wastes: the case for Britain

In England and Wales, the construction industry produces 53.5 Mt of construction and demolition waste (C&D waste) annually, of which 51 percent goes to landfill, 40 percent is used for land reclamation and only 9 percent is crushed for future use or directly recovered. C&D waste may be contaminated, either through spillage from industrial processes or contact with contaminated land. There are no guidelines on how to classify C&D waste as contaminated or on risk management for contaminated C&D waste. Research at the UK Building Research Establishment and the University of Manchester has shown that new taxes are making disposal of C&D waste to landfill uneconomic, that low grade “land‐modelling” recycling is increasing, and that disposal on‐site is preferred. Sampling spatially of structures before demolition and temporally of processed C&D waste emerging from crushers is enabling sources of contamination and exceedance of guideline values to be compared with natural background levels. Improved sampling procedures and recommendations for risk assessment for the re‐use of C&D waste are being prepared.

The Human Dimensions of Geomorphological Work in Britain

The transfer of materials from the natural environment to the urban and industrially built environment produces two broad impacts on the landscape: a removal of materials from the earths surface (a change in geomorphology) and the accumulation of a stock of concrete and other materials elsewhere in cities and industrial zones (a change in urban morphology). Thus, industrial activity transforms natural landscapes and, in doing so, has to be considered to be a geological and geomorphological agent. On the global scale, the deliberate shift of around 57,000 Mt (megatons)/yr of materials through mineral extraction processes exceeds the annual transport of sediment to the oceans by rivers (some 22,000 Mt/yr) by almost a factor of three. On the island of Britain, the total deliberate shift of earth‐surface materials is between 688 and 972 Mt/yr, depending on whether or not the replacement of overburden in opencast coal mining is taken into account. The export of sediment to the oceans by rivers is only 10 Mt/yr whereas the export of materials in solution is about 40 Mt/yr, making the deliberate materials shift nearly 14 times larger than the shift caused by natural processes. Processes examined by industrial ecology, such as direct excavation, urban development, and waste dumping are those most driving changes in the shape of the British landscape today. These transformations pose added costs. Industrial ecology will produce an understanding of the hidden costs associated with these transformations. Such an understanding will help in planning and encouraging the reuse of materials everywhere and in identifying the key areas for intervention to reduce off‐site geomorphological impacts and costs.

Airport construction: materials use and geomorphic change

As airport construction competes for land, more and more new developments involve major landform changes, from the channel modifications on the River Bollin at Manchester Airport to the seaward expansion of runways at Sydney and Beirut and the enlargement or total creation of islands at Chek Lap Kok Airport, Hong Kong and Kansai International Airport in Osaka Bay, Japan. The quantities of material involved are large, 307Mm3 of material being moved for Chep Lap Kok Airport and 13Mm3 will be needed to fill the area required for a new runway at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Both the landform changes and the excavation and filling of materials produce profound geomorphic changes. In some cases the new configurations are unstable and may need to be rectified by further engineering work. Greater sustainability is achieved when recycled material is used for filling, such as the use of some 2Mm3 of material dredged as a part of normal navigation channel maintenance from the Delaware River in the construction of a new commuter airline runway at Philadelphia International Airport.

The Role of Formal and Informal Insurance Mechanisms for Reducing Urban Disaster Risk: A South-North Comparison

Climate change and disasters pose a serious and growing risk to sustainable urban development planning, with disasters having quadrupled in the last three decades. The extent of the changing climatic conditions, in combination with growing urbanisation, is making both Southern and Northern institutions and associated social security and governance systems increasingly inadequate in dealing with extreme weather events. This results in an urgent need to discover innovative ways to adapt ‘outdated’ institutional responses and to increase local-level engagement. This paper analyses current risk financing mechanisms at local and institutional levels in both a Southern and a Northern city (San Salvador and Manchester respectively). The Norths dependency on insurance fails to contribute to resilience whereas the Souths reliance on non-governmental aid organisations (NGOs) has driven a range of bottom-up approaches that support improved risk reduction. Although measures for risk financing are still not part of the NGOs’ repertoire, this provides lessons from which Northern cities could also learn.