Disaster waste and debris clean-up decisions of government actors in the United States: social process and socio-material systems

Abstract

In the United States, debris removal is one of the costliest and most time-consuming elements of disaster response and recovery. It is essential to reducing secondary environmental and health risks, and to community recovery and rebuilding. Analysis of debris removal and waste management, though, primarily treats it as a series of operational steps and technical decisions. In contrast, this article analyses disaster debris removal decision-making as a social process. We present the findings of an ethnographic study that engaged over 70 government actors from federal, state, local, and Tribal agencies in focus groups and interviews. By examining the experiences of these actors, who are central to debris removal decisions, this article identifies decision points that send waste down particular pathways from collection to final disposal. Three operational areas of concern that emerge from the analysis are: local control and capacity, cost and reimbursement, and balance between urgency and sustainability. This article shows how social processes in particular socio-material systems shape these decisions, such as the interplay of waste and disaster institutional arrangements. Finally, it shares practical implications for social process workarounds to operational challenges, such as interagency and interlevel relationships, that can support on-the-ground decision-making.

Introduction

Post-disaster debris removal is one of the costliest and most time-consuming elements of disaster response and recovery. After Hurricane Katrina, it cost over $3.7 billion to remove more than 99 million cubic yards of debris (EPA, 2019). In Puerto Rico, back-to-back hurricanes Irma and María generated over 2.5 million tons of debris (EPA & FEMA, 2021), the equivalent of nearly 3 years of solid waste entering landfills at once (Brinton et al., 2022). Debris management is necessary for reducing risks of post-disaster environmental and health hazards from contaminated waste materials. It also sets the stage for long-term rebuilding and community recovery. Decision-making regarding waste generated in disasters is logistically and organizationally complex, as well as emotionally fraught. It comes at a time when local governments, responders, businesses, and residents are overwhelmed. Individuals, households, community groups, humanitarian organizations, and government agencies all engage in sorting, removing, and disposing of waste materials in the wake of an incident, using different and sometimes conflicting goals and information to make such decisions. In the United States, distinct legal authorities and funding streams are at play depending on location, incident type, and waste material.

Despite the importance of disaster waste and debris management (DWDM) to disaster response and recovery, it has received limited attention in hazard and disaster studies. The research that does address DWDM is dominated by the engineering and physical sciences on waste characterization and estimation methods, modelling and analysis of disposal options, decontamination techniques, environmental impacts and monitoring, and other technical matters (Brown & Milke, 2016; Marchesini et al., 2021; Miller & Lemieux, 2007; Portugal-Pereira & Lee, 2016). This body of work has produced decision-support tools and data to characterize post-incident waste streams, estimate debris volumes, identify staging sites, and evaluate treatment and disposal options (Kim et al., 2018; Lorca et al., 2017). Investigation of DWDM decision-making itself, however, is not commensurate to its role in response and recovery.

Hazards and disaster research examines decision-making within mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery as a whole, illuminating how organizational structure and culture, relationships and networks, communication and public engagement, and institutional processes give rise to particular decisions and outcomes (Goldstein, 2008; Haque et al., 2002; Kendra & Wachtendorf, 2003; Rodríguez et al., 2018; Weick, 1993). Researchers have not extended this analytical lens to disaster waste management decisions. Discard studies scholarship on waste illuminates the importance of power dynamics and cultural values guiding the formation of social constructs of what waste is, how it is categorized and managed, and the socio-material of its management (Douglas, 2003; Liboiron & Lepawsky, 2022; Ureta, 2016). This emerging area of inquiry has not engaged substantively with the particular social and environmental contexts of disasters (though chronic, ‘slow disasters’ are well-documented, i.e. Stamatopoulou-Robbins (2019)). The body of work on disaster waste as a specific topic has treated DWDM as primarily a series of operational steps and technical decisions based on regulatory requirements and on the material properties of the debris (Brown et al., 2011; Jalloul et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2019). While it does describe individual, household, and organizational responses, it does not examine the wider social structures and processes that shape actions and decisions. This article brings these literatures together to advance our understanding of disaster waste management by analysing disaster debris removal decision-making as a social process. It generates new insights into how dynamic socio-material systems shape DWDM decisions made by government actors. These insights have practical ramifications for disaster debris removal planning and implementation.

This study conducted an institutional ethnography, undertaking qualitative data collection and analysis by carrying out focus groups and interviews with practitioners who work on waste management and debris removal in federal, state, territorial, Tribal, and local government agencies in the United States. The focus on government actors brings forward the perspectives of on-the-ground decision-makers in disaster waste planning and operations. In the United States, disaster debris removal is guided by a combination of solid and hazardous waste management statutes and regulations organized by the material aspects of waste streams (e.g. Resource Conservation and Recovery Act) with disaster frameworks and policies (e.g. National Response Framework, Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act). Government actors from federal to local levels need to navigate this intersection of frameworks. The research team sought to understand what decisions are being made in this space, by whom, using what criteria, and across what timeframe. It identified DWDM decision points and the challenges and workarounds to debris removal necessitated by the socio-material system in which it takes place.

Three operational areas of concern surfaced in interviews and focus groups as central to on-the-ground DWDM decision-making in the United States: local control and capacity, cost and reimbursement, and balance between urgency and sustainability. Qualitative analysis of these data revealed broader social processes at work within specific socio-material systems. Of particular import are: the disconnect between institutional arrangements of everyday waste management and of emergency management; the lack of interagency and interlevel relationships among government agencies to support capacity-building; and tensions between various, largely unspoken, management goals and values in disasters.

This study has practical implications for disaster waste management. Between January and October of 2023, the United States went through 24 separate billion-dollar weather and climate events (NCEI, 2023). Across the country, communities are experiencing unprecedented disasters (e.g. 2020 wildfires in Oregon), as well as compound and cascading incidents (Jay et al., 2023). Repercussions of these trends for disaster debris are greater volumes, novel waste types, higher removal costs, more government coordination, and more need to understand and improve capacity at all levels of government. This research provides a map of potential points of intervention pre-and post-incident that may be productively changed to improve debris disposal decisions and outcomes. As Dawdy (2006, p. 728) notes, ‘processes of burial, trash disposal, earth moving, and landscape modification [in the wake of a disaster] are social processes.’ Social processes involve the interaction of individuals, groups, and organizations, and the ways in which they are affected by broader social systems and structures (e.g. markets, governance, religion, cultural norms and values, institutions). Here, we argue that DWDM decision-making must be analysed as social processes, rather than as a discrete ‘social consideration’ largely dissociated from analytical constructs. Further, we assert that this needs to be done within a framework that captures the social and organizational dynamics of disasters as well as the materiality of disaster waste.

Materials and methods

This research draws on ethnographic approaches and methods from the anthropology of public policy and institutional ethnography to understand the social processes – behaviours, values, power dynamics, organizational structures, and relationships – that shape government agency decision-making about DWDM (Abram, 2003; DeVault & McCoy, 2006; Heyman, 2004). First, we conducted a systematic literature review of social science research on DWDM in Web of Science and ProQuest databases. The search cast a wide net across disciplines, resulting in 48 relevant articles after screening (see Figure 1). Inclusion criteria were that the article had to address one or more social topics as related to disaster waste, be peer-reviewed, published after 1996, in English, and draw upon social theory and/ or methods. We were particularly interested in literature that addressed decision-making by disaster or environmental agencies but included materials from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and topics.

Figure 1.

Literature review inclusion process.

Second, we carried out in-depth, qualitative interviews and focus groups to generate thick descriptions of the social processes surrounding DWDM decisions (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). An ethnographic approach was utilized because it enables attention to the power dynamics embedded in and human interactions with bureaucratic structures and organizational processes (Abram, 2003; DeVault & McCoy, 2006; Heyman, 2004). Traditional anthropological fieldwork relies on long-term participant observation within a specific social setting as a cornerstone. Instead, we used methods common to ‘studying up,’ where ‘the field’ is a government agency office and ‘fieldwork’ entails moments of interaction with participants rather than sustained engagement (Schwegler & Powell, 2008; Souleles, 2018; Nader, 1972). We used interviews and focus groups in order to target conversations on the particulars of DWDM actions within operational stages, allowing us to analyse the discourse and experiences of governmental actors involved, organizational processes, and institutional configurations of power and knowledge (DeVault & McCoy, 2006; Heyman, 2004; Schwegler & Powell, 2008). Institutional ethnography focuses on the experiences of members of the public drawn into ‘ruling relations’ with institutions; we instead focus on the experiences working within institutions (Smith, 2005; DeVault & McCoy, 2006). Our objective, though, is similar in creating a map that can help those involved with DWDM navigate it (c.f. Smith, 2005).

We conducted 14 focus groups and 9 one-on-one interviews with over 70 government actors from both disaster and waste-related organizations who do on-the-ground work in DWDM planning and implementation. The research team used purposeful, non-probabilistic sampling (Oliver, 2006; Patton, 2014) to identify and recruit participants from a range of agencies (e.g. emergency management, environment), jurisdictions (e.g. federal, state, county, Tribal, local), and experience with different types of incidents (e.g. Stafford Act response to a Category 5 hurricane, localized flooding) (see Tables 1 and 2). Ethnographic research operates under the premise that participants are experts in their own experience. Ethnographic research on institutions and policy does not select samples intended to be representative of a population or comprehensive categorical descriptions. As such, recruitment for this study was not based on number of years an individual had worked on this topic, a nationally representative sample of individual contributor roles or of government agencies, or comprehensive coverage of all disaster situations. Instead, we sought to get a broad picture of DWDM processes across a range of organizations and participant experiences (DeVault & McCoy, 2006; Heyman, 2004). This achieves the goal of this type of qualitative inquiry which seeks to understand a breadth of experiences rather than the prevalence of any one type of experience. We oversampled for federal participants because of the reach these agencies have in different incident types and their role as nodes in coordination. The team used prior knowledge of agency roles, contacts available through our own institutional networks, and scrutiny of reports and other documents to assemble an initial list of prospective participants (Souleles, 2018; Schwegler & Powell, 2008; Nader, 1972). After each session, we asked participants about whom else the team should recruit as a form of snowball sampling (Parker et al., 2019).

Table 1.

Sampling universe of participants.

Types of incidents worked on
Animal disease outbreak		Flooding	Hurricane
Oil spill	Pandemic	Tornado	Wildfire
Types of agencies working in
Agriculture	Coastal, ocean, marine management
Emergency management		Environment	Public health
Public works	Waste management
Disaster stages involved with
Preparedness	Response	Recovery

Table 2.

Number of research participants at each level of government.

Level of government	Number of participants
Federal	31
Tribal	8
State	22
County	5
Local	5
TOTAL	71

Focus groups and interview sessions were held virtually via Microsoft Teams from October 2021 to March 2022 facilitated by the same researcher across all sessions, with support from one additional researcher in most sessions. Each session was between 60 and 90 min depending on the number of participants, which ranged from one participant per interview and from two to six participants per focus group, depending on logistics, including schedule changes of participants as new and ongoing disaster circumstances developed. Our interview and focus group guide contained the following question types: participants were asked to describe their role in debris removal, respond to a schema we provided of operational stages in waste management, and elaborate on the decisions they and other agencies made. Additionally, they were asked to reflect on pain points, workarounds, and opportunities for collaboration in the field. The question format and order varied to better follow participants’ lead and gain deeper understanding of how they interpret DWDM as a social phenomenon and experience organizational settings (DeVault & McCoy, 2006 Merriam & Tisdell, 2016).

Sessions were recorded and transcribed. Thematic qualitative analysis was conducted on transcripts in NVivo using an a priori codebook paired with inductive coding methods (DeCuir-Gunby et al., 2011; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). The researchers looked for preidentified concepts based on codes for waste and incident type, operational stages from the schema, and topics from the literature review. They added new codes as themes emerged through iterative analysis of the transcripts. One researcher was identified as the primary coder that coded all of the transcripts initially; a second researcher coded a subsection of transcripts as a quality control measure. Coders met at regular intervals during the analysis to vet and consolidate inductive codes, refine a priori codes, and ensure inter-rater reliability. Following DeCuir-Gunby et al. (2011), inter-rater reliability was achieved through discussion and consensus rather than quantitative metrics. The act of sorting out conflicting codes becomes part of the iterative nature of ethnographic analysis.

Research protocols were reviewed and approved as exempt by the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Office of Human Research Ethics. All prospective participants were provided with written and verbal descriptions of the project, including potential risks and benefits of participation. Verbal consent was obtained from each participant individually prior to the start of any recording.

As with all research, our methodology confronted limitations. The scope of this study covered government but not private sector actors (e.g. waste haulers) given travel restrictions at the time. Nevertheless, being able to carry out qualitative research with government actors who work across incident and agency types has resulted in a novel dataset and new insights into DWDM as a social process, beyond accounts of individual cases found in the literature review.

Results & discussion

Social science of disaster (and) waste

Within the social sciences, literature on disaster debris removal is sparse. As discussed in the introduction, it has not received significant attention in either hazards and disaster studies or in discard studies. Our literature review found 48 articles that connected disasters, waste management, and the social sciences in some way. Further scrutiny of the articles, however, reveals that many of these connections are tenuous. Several only briefly mention waste as part of a wider discussion of disasters (Dargin & Mostafavi, 2020; DeCair & Cardarelli, 2018). Others are descriptive case studies of post-incident waste management that do not necessarily analyse why events played out as they did (Guerrero-Miranda & Luque González, 2021; Hernandez-Padilla & Angles, 2021; Weaver, 2007). A third set describes techniques, decision support tools, and models for improving DWDM that do include one or more social variables such as economic or psychological cost yet focus primarily on technical aspects of waste collection and disposal (Ekici et al., 2009; Habib et al., 2019; Hu et al., 2019; Trivedi et al., 2015). Our findings track those of earlier review papers on DWDM by Brown et al. (2011), updated by Zhang et al. (2019), and again by Jalloul et al. (2022). These reviews, too, encountered ample research regarding technical specifications for disaster waste sorting, hauling, staging, and disposal, but encountered fewer than a dozen papers on what the authors termed ‘social considerations’ of DWDM.

Our second finding is that while the current literature does address social considerations associated with DWDM, it generally does not draw upon wider explanatory frameworks for individual and institutional behaviour. Our review did find a few exceptions that engaged with theories of social capital, capacity building, and environmental justice, among others (Denhart, 2009; Hooper, 2019; Karunasena & Amaratunga, 2016; Kawamoto & Kim, 2016; Otsuki, 2016). The researchers that address DWDM decision-making identify social and economic considerations that go into decisions such as logistics, cost, transportation, sustainability, debris types, markets, and labour (Brown & Milke, 2016; Ekici et al., 2009; Hayes et al., 2015; Hu & Sheu, 2013; Trivedi et al., 2015). They describe conflicts that arise and perceptions of debris management options (Brown & Milke, 2016; Schmitt-Harsh & Wiseman, 2020). They discuss social factors that affect implementation of decisions including communication (Ekici et al., 2009; Hardie & McKinley, 2014), volunteer participation in cleanups (Sharpe et al., 2019), and organizational structure, coordination, challenges, and capacity (Guerrero-Miranda & Luque González, 2021; Hooper, 2019; Karunasena & Amaratunga, 2016; Pramana, 2010; Zhang & Mendonca, 2021).

The relative absence of explanatory frameworks for DWDM carries over to previous reviews of this topic. These papers use the language of ‘social considerations’ to highlight social groups or issues that might affect or be affected by DWDM (Brown et al., 2011; Jalloul et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2019). Additional categories the papers propose are economics, funding, organizational aspects, and legal frameworks (Table 3). These categories are useful in beginning to parse out factors that might arise during decision-making or that affect its implementation. We posit, though, that they are inadequate to the task of explaining DWDM decision-making. For example, the categories used for people are: victims, employees, and communities (Brown et al., 2011; Jalloul et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2019). This approach to categorization is incomplete and disconnected from analytical groupings common to sociological or anthropological literatures. Furthermore, it contains the implication that DWDM is a thing external-to-society, as something that impacts social groups in the form of cleanup worker health (Ekenga & Friedman-Jimenez, 2011; Reibman et al., 2016), and the social and psychological effects of debris management (Denhart, 2009; Hu et al., 2019). As such, it lacks explanatory power for the social and institutional dynamics of debris removal as a social phenomenon.

Table 3.

Existing categories used to characterize social dimensions of DWDM.

Category	Subcategories
	Brown et al. (2011)	Zhang et al. (2019)	Jalloul et al. (2022)
Economics	No subcategories	No subcategories	No subcategories
Social considerations	Public health and safety Community/psychosocial impact Communication Employment and capacity building	Victims Employees Communities	Levels of social capital Public involvement in debris operations Status of the debris removal operations Social benefits of recycling
Organizational aspects	Overall coordination Organization of physical works	No subcategories	Not used
Legal frameworks	No subcategories	No subcategories	Not used
Funding	No subcategories	No subcategories	(as Funding policies)

Social processes shaping on-the-ground decision-making

Our research offers a perspective on DWDM as a social process by first ground-truthing the general series of in-the-field actions and decisions that make up DWDM. Operational guidance for debris removal in the United States (see EPA, 2019; Program, 2017) presents a linear process of technical steps from (1) estimating the volume of debris; (2) characterizing and sorting waste; (3) if necessary, hauling waste material to temporary staging sites, and/or carrying out initial treatment; to (4) transporting to a disposal site (e.g. landfill, incinerator). Figure 2 illustrates generalized actions comprising DWDM that we assembled from the literature and refined through participant ground-truthing. Arrows represent decision points that result in waste materials taking one pathway or another to final disposal. An implicit assumption in both operational guidance and the DWDM literature is that decisions about which actions are taken and in what order are determined by technical specifications and regulatory requirements for distinct waste materials, as well as ‘social considerations’ such as cost and timing.

Figure 2.

Generalized map of DWDM actions. Each arrow represents a decision point.

During interviews and focus groups, we provided a list of operational steps to research participants, who described additions to and rearrangement of these steps along with discussion of who was involved. We found exceptions to be the rule; that is, waste materials often take circuitous and varied pathways to final disposal and DWDM best practices are rarely achieved (Figure 3). For example, recycling of post-disaster waste is a desirable alternative to landfill disposal (Brown & Milke, 2016; EPA, 2019; Jalloul et al., 2022). What field practitioners have observed in incidents, though, is that basic sorting of materials is not always accomplished, much less alternatives to landfill disposal. No single government agency has hands-on experience with all actions and decisions. For example, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineering (USACE) is tasked with debris removal under Emergency Support Function #3, including actions under ‘the push’ box (Figures 2 and 3), but relies on other agencies to conduct and regulate waste disposal.

Figure 3.

Example material pathways through DWDM actions. (A) a common route, with limited steps; (B) best practice pathway to achieve environmental goals for comingled debris from multiple sites; (C) best practice pathway to achieve environmental goals for organic debris on a single site; (D) double handling of waste between staging and transport.

Through our qualitative analysis, we were able to map out this variety of material pathways. Figure 3(A) is a common pathway as described by practitioners, where steps are skipped for reasons detailed in the next sections. Figure 3(B,C) display best practice pathways for avoiding secondary environmental problems and supporting recycling and composting: waste separation and onsite treatment in 3(B) for managing comingled wastes on multiple sites, and waste collection and composting without transport to another site in 3 (C) for managing organic waste and debris on a single site. The multiple arrows between waste staging and transport in 3(D) indicate ‘double handling,’ a common but less desirable pathway from a cost and timing perspective. It is important to understand how and why waste travels the path it does, as it carries environmental and social consequences. For example, debris management plans for densely developed areas often designate parks and sports fields as waste staging sites due to a lack of open space. Not separating or treating materials in the staging area can create secondary environmental problems. Staging, while intended to last for days to weeks, can stretch to months and years, limiting access to recreational amenities.

Our analysis shows that decisions behind why post-incident waste takes the pathway it does are shaped by social processes within socio-material systems. Here, we highlight three social processes that have a strong influence on DWDM decisions: the disconnection between institutional arrangements of everyday waste management and of emergency management, lack of interagency and interlevel relationships among government agencies that support capacity, and tensions between management goals and values in disasters (Figure 4). The next section details three operational areas of concern, that were revealed by practitioners, examined through a social process lens: (1) local control and capacity, (2) cost and reimbursement, and (3) balancing urgency with sustainability. This novel framing of DWDM as a social process helps identify operational workarounds and opportunities for improving future decision-making; this is because the socio-material systems in which these social processes play out carry distinct implications for the pathway waste takes and the ensuing consequences (Table 4).

Figure 4.

Social processes (relationships, institutional arrangements, goals and values) – a part of distinct social-material systems that include disaster characteristics – shape decisions about waste actions in three DWDM-specific operational areas of concern: local control and capacity, cost and reimbursement, and balancing urgency with sustainability.

Table 4.

Elements of socio-material systems affecting debris removal decisions.

Element	Definition	Example
Disaster Characteristics	Incident type, cause, intensity, duration, location, and social context differ subtly or drastically	Animal carcases in a large hurricane vs a disease outbreak require different handling
Relationships	Formal and informal connections between individuals who work in government or private organizations on DWDM-related topics	State and county waste managers have regular meetings to discuss landfill capacity
Interagency	Connections between government actors who work for different types of agencies	Department of Environmental Quality staff interact regularly with counterparts in the Agriculture Department in their state
Interlevel	Connections between government actors who work at different levels of government	Federal, state, county, and Tribal emergency managers participate in a tabletop exercise
Institutional Arrangements	Governance and organizational structure guide agencies' roles, responsibilities, and interactions	Public assistance requests come to FEMA from states, which receive requests from local government
Waste management	Rules and practices of everyday management of waste and debris	Public works waste collection of municipal solid waste from curbside to landfill
Disaster management	Disaster-specific rules and practices for debris removal and waste management	Emergency Support Functions #3 and #10 determine federal agency responsibilities for different waste materials
Values	Taken-for-granted perceptions and ideas about how the world works that inform management actions	Urgency to get back to normal as soon as possible affects DWDM decisions

Local control and capacity

A primary driver of operational DWDM decision-making is local control and capacity: ‘the “localist” level is going to be [by] default managing and responsible for the event’ (County practitioner). Operationally, local control means that county, municipal, and Tribal governments are responsible for assessing whether they can manage the waste and debris from a disaster and, if not, requesting technical and financial assistance for debris removal. Under the Stafford Act and National Disaster Response Framework, local governments are responsible for reaching out for disaster technical and financial assistance to states. States, in turn, send requests to the federal government. Federal agencies contain a wealth of technical expertise in debris removal for specific materials such as radiological, chemical, and biological wastes (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)); marine debris (U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)); animal carcases (U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS)); oil spills (U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) and EPA); and construction and demolition debris (USACE). Staff from these agencies cannot provide post-incident technical assistance for DWDM until officially invited. Our analysis revealed that local control as both an institutional arrangement and a value creates DWDM challenges and leads to decisions that send waste down particular pathways.

One of the values we heard among practitioners is the desire to avoid secondary environmental and health problems caused by delayed or inadequate DWDM. As it stands, it can take weeks to carry out post-incident operational planning for debris removal once an emergency or disaster declaration is made. On top of that, federal actors feel they spend additional time bringing local government actors on board with DWDM actions: ‘It took us about a month to get out in the field to start the work [in one case] because there’s all that education, negotiations, explaining why we’re doing this’ (Federal practitioner). A key local capacity issue revealed here was a misunderstanding of how disaster waste consequences scale from small to large events:

[A local responder might say,] ‘I don’t understand, we had a house burn last year … We didn’t have a hazmat crew come out and collect all this.’ Yeah, it was one house, but when you have 4,000 homes …, instead of 10 or 30 gallons now you have 150,000 gallons of hazardous material, now you have a problem. (Federal practitioner)

This importantly connects with broader research on individuals’ reliance on past experience or recognition of a similar situation to choose a course of action that was ‘workable, timely, and cost effective’ when needing to respond quickly, rather than weighing new options (Klein, 2008).

Our analysis found the idea of local control itself remaining unquestioned across all levels of government. Even when expressing frustration with local decisions or capacity issues, local control emerged as an internalized organizational cultural norm influencing DWDM decision-making above and beyond specific rules. This particular value is important to recognize and understand when designing solutions to address operational pain points.

We found that lack of local level capacity exacerbates both federal and local operational pain points stemming from local control. Our analysis confirmed capacity issues in many counties and small municipal governments, as well as at the state level in some cases; practitioners explained that staff are spread thin and turnover is high. This has particular impacts for DWDM because the necessary parties who need to come together to prepare, practice, and implement debris management plans are not able to develop the institutional know-how and relationships.

We all have day jobs. We don’t have dedicated staff to disaster response or planning … (Municipal practitioner)

It’s like a revolving door lately: people stick around for 2 or 3 years, and they’re gone. That’s one of the anxieties I have when we do have a big debris-generating event that, you know, we just won’t have that institutional knowledge. (State practitioner)

At the local level, this lack of capacity compounds the confusion around who and when to ask for help with DWDM. It can result in deviations from ‘best practice’ DWDM pathways that can lead to secondary environmental contamination from improper waste collection or disposal:

So, at what point does a city say ‘we can’t do this, we need to request assistance from the county’. And at what point does the county say, ‘we can’t do this, we need to request assistance from the state,’ which rolls up to the federal government. I think those are really challenging decision points and they often don’t get made until it’s too late or … something bad happened or there was a mistake … (County practitioner)

From the federal perspective, local capacity is a pain point that exacerbates the delay in technical assistance, limiting the ability to conduct best practice DWDM actions. Local level actors, contrastingly, articulate the problem as the complicated maze of state and federal institutional arrangements for DWDM. They don’t know whom to contact or how to begin. State and federal authority for DWDM is siloed by specific waste stream and disaster type and there is also staff turnover in those agencies. Local level governments are often unsure of the appropriate chain of contact, especially with novel waste types or volumes. This can result in problems when applying for reimbursement for debris removal, to which we now turn.

Cost and reimbursement

The existing literature on DWDM posits that cost is a primary driver of DWDM decisions, with cost framed as selecting between disposal or transportation options based on price (Brown et al., 2011; Zhang et al., 2019). While we also find that money plays a significant role in determining debris removal pathways, our results show that the principal driver for on-the-ground decisions is not cost comparison, but rather cost and reimbursement as a social process. Disaster clean-up is extremely expensive, making reimbursement critical for municipal, Tribal, and county governments. In smaller incidents, this funding might come from the state. In major incidents, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Public Assistance program is the primary avenue for funding disaster debris removal. The process of figuring out who is going to pay and through what mechanism is a critical part of operational planning stage before waste collection even begins. As one county-level practitioner describes it:

Most debris planning is about money because … debris cleanup events are hugely expensive, and no local government could really fund it on its own. It’s all about, how do we do something to check off FEMA’s boxes so we can get a reimbursement for what we’re doing?

These sentiments are echoed by state-level practitioners:

Who’s gonna pay for it? Nothing is going to get started until that gets figured out. You can have the greatest plan, but … is the federal, state, local [level paying]? Are folks on their own? How is the cleanup getting funded? ‘Cause we’re talking lots of dollars.

Our analysis confirmed that the institutional arrangements for reimbursement are a pain point at all levels of government. First, reimbursement is never all-inclusive. It entails cost-sharing, the percentage of which generally ranges between 75 and 95 percent (FEMA, 2020). Second, there are strict limitations on which debris removal costs are considered eligible, as documented in the 300-page Public Assistance Program and Policy Guide (PAPPG) referred to as the ‘Papa-G’ (FEMA, 2020). Cost eligibility depends on a variety of factors, including incident type, waste material, who is allowed to move waste materials, and property rights, among other factors, which can be an unwelcome surprise:

People assume that if it’s a flood then, you know, if there are [animal/livestock] carcasses out there that FEMA will come along and clean it up, not realizing that distinction between private land or public land … I think part of that is educating the public ahead of time about how those [reimbursements] can take place. (Federal practitioner)

The third aspect of this pain point is the need for extensive documentation and monitoring of waste management to secure reimbursement. This requirement places an additional administrative, emotional, logistical, and financial burden on local and state governments in a time of crisis:

[Municipal staff and contractors] have someone watching the trucks being loaded; … all the disposal sites had to set up viewing stands so that they could see the debris coming in; on trees you had to take a GPS of the tree, picture of the tree, a picture of the stump, picture of where the tree was moved to. (Municipal practitioner)

Practitioners spoke of hiring additional consultants to meet monitoring requirements, highlighting the interactions and relationships of government actors with the private sector. Ensuring ‘a very detailed audit of your record-keeping’ (State practitioner) that did not inadvertently limit reimbursement was a point of anxiety for many practitioners with whom we spoke.

Cost reimbursement affects the debris pathway, as well. The PAPPG states that debris removal only qualifies for reimbursement if it is an ‘immediate threat’ or necessary for emergency response. We heard from practitioners that implicit or explicit deadlines based on this delineation contributed to getting debris removal done quickly, even if the manner of doing so was not otherwise an optimal solution. The institutional arrangements of reimbursement also reveal ambiguities in what it means to ‘make a decision’ about DWDM. Federal participants spoke of local and state control of DWDM as the locus of control, whereas local and state participants spoke of deference to federal level:

Everything’s driven by … what the federal government will approve, and our operations are designed to be in alignment with Federal Public Assistance Policy … We design our contracts in coordination with [the state emergency management office] to ensure that we align with what will be reimbursed so that we can maximize our reimbursement eligibility. (State practitioner)

Urgency-sustainability tensions

An organizational and cultural value of urgency exists in emergency response which has a direct influence on the options considered in disaster response and recovery (Nelson et al., 2007; Olshansky et al., 2012). As Olshansky (2006) asserts succinctly, ‘every post-disaster recovery manifests tension between speed and deliberation.’ Initially, urgency outweighs deliberation to accomplish life-saving actions and direct control of contamination that can cause acute human health impacts. As a disaster response and then recovery progresses, however, this urgency often remains, switching focus to the desire to ‘get back to normal’ as quickly as possible, often continuing to push aside deliberation. For DWDM, we found that this often means clearing waste and debris off sites to allow for rebuilding: ‘You know, first and foremost was starting to get these properties cleaned up so people could get back and start rebuilding their lives’ (State practitioner). Practitioners expressed explicitly feeling a sense of urgency throughout response and recovery. Urgency is a cultural value and taken-for granted norm in emergency response. This can manifest as specific political pressure points from city councillors, mayors, governors, Congressional representatives, and other entities,

Local governments will be getting tremendous amount of pressure from their communities to get it together, to clean it up, to get things back, to come pick up … ‘the debris at my house, on my property, to come clean up in front of my house.’ (County practitioner)

Urgency plays a role in cost and reimbursement if actions are taken quickly in a way that later negatively affects reimbursement:

Everybody just wants to get the job done. I won’t say just local government, I’ve seen it at the federal level too, where people will say ‘cut the red tape out, let’s get this job done.’ You’ll come back a year or two later to FEMA and you’ll find that you’re not going to get reimbursed ‘cause you cut through the red tape. (State practitioner)

Our analysis found that this urgency also affects the pathway that waste takes, including the urgency to accomplish tasks before deadlines for reimbursement. One specific decision point we heard a lot about was selection of the final disposal method. Practitioners directly connected the urgency value with the tendency to send waste to a landfill instead of alternative such as recycling or re-purposing material for a new use. This dependency on landfills as a default solution can create its own logistics challenges. Nearby landfills might be at or near capacity, as was the case after Hurricane María in Puerto Rico (EPA & FEMA, 2021).

Federal and state environmental agencies support sustainable materials management in everyday waste management and are trying to expand this to post-disaster debris removal (EPA, 2021). Research participants were familiar with this guidance and discussed examples they’ve seen of post-incident recycling and repurposing: mulching vegetative debris, composting animal carcases, and recycling refrigerators and other ‘white goods’ after an incident. However, they also discussed the difficulties with implementing such practices in the field. As the following quotations illustrate, putting this value of sustainability into practice runs into challenges with the values and institutional arrangements of disaster debris removal, including urgency:

… looking at recycling, reuse, environmental constraints, it will slow down or could slow down the debris removal from the curbside. Now you’re impacting the community being able to respond and recover by properly handling some of the waste. Yeah, it’s a balancing act and we’ve dealt a lot with it … Sometimes [recycling and beneficial reuse], it’s just not practical. (Federal practitioner)

… it gets fast and busy and it’s a lot of material moving really quickly, and the goal is to reduce the piles as quick as we can … Letting companies or businesses or reuse organizations go through the debris has got all kinds of risks associated with it. (County practitioner)

This finding reflects concepts in the disaster literature like ‘time compression’, which articulates the ways that some social processes can more easily be ‘compressed’ or done quickly to fit the intensity and speed at which disaster response actions must be done, while other processes necessitate deliberation and are difficult to compress (particularly processes of bureaucratic oversight and community-engaged planning processes), making them ill-suited to disaster response (Olshansky et al., 2012). Though disaster waste management extends beyond the disaster response phase, into recovery and rebuilding phases, we note that a focus on urgency tends to remain, unintentionally maintaining a state of time compression and limiting deliberative social processes.

‘Workarounds’ that improve DWDM operations

Through a focus on government actors working on-the-ground, we were able to collect and analyse the implicit solutions, or workarounds, that practitioners use in their day-to-day DWDM work to negotiate socio-material systems. Importantly, we expand the universe of DWDM solutions beyond refining technical specifications to include social process workarounds. These workarounds support the findings of crisis scholars who emphasize the importance of on-the-ground flexibility in disaster response situations; for example, the need for mechanisms which Boin et al. (2016) describe as allowing decision-makers to switch to ‘crisis improvisation mode’ to allow decision-makers to negotiate unique or unexpected issues quickly. Some of the workarounds we found represent ‘bottom-up’ coordination and others ‘top-down’ coordination, both of which must converge in effective response and recovery (Boin et al., 2016).

In particular, we found relationship-building to be an overarching social process that is crucial to effective DWDM. But on-the-ground it was found to be mostly an informal workaround rather than a formal part debris planning and management. Beyond general relationship-building, our analysis revealed two specific types of relationship-building that government actors found particularly helpful: interlevel (e.g. between state and federal government actors) and interagency (e.g. between environmental and emergency response agencies). We also found that relationship-building was a cross-cutting social process that enhanced and worked in-concert with other aspects of the socio-material system, including institutional arrangements, disaster characteristics, and values. Because each of these elements of the socio-material system of DWDM is overlapping, we describe each below as they all build on relationship-building to highlight the interplay between social processes.

First, in regard to interlevel government relationships, participants articulated how local staff are better able to conduct DWDM when they know staff at state and federal levels. A primary benefit of this type of relationship is an increase in local experience and understanding of federal governmental silos, or the specific institutional arrangements that can provide sanctioned help and expertise (Boin et al., 2016). This strengthens local capacity to manage ‘novel-to-them’ waste types and volumes:

In a lot of the fire missions … concrete is required to be recycled unless there’s some issue with rebar and such …. There has to be segregation in a fire event because the material that is actually burned is considered hazardous, toxic. So recyclable metal has to be rinsed on site and concrete has to be segregated, and then the construction debris and ash and trash is then hauled off in a different manner. There are specifically different waste streams that need to be handled during the fire event. (Federal practitioner)

Having interlevel relationships in place before an incident was described as easing local anxieties around how to respond. Connections between FEMA and local, county, and Tribal government actors is particularly important. This relationship-building can help local government staff navigate the complexities of the cost and reimbursement process: ‘It doesn’t feel like we have regular connections or regular planning conversations with FEMA [regarding reimbursement procedures] … so that they could learn with us or be part of the conversation, because it’s a big question mark that hangs over everything.’ (County practitioner)

Second, interagency relationships between different types of agencies or between agencies at the same level of government but in other locations, are key to the navigation of other complicated institutional arrangements. We found this to be particularly important in DWDM to foster more resilient and sustainable waste pathways. Interagency relationships do this is two ways. First, bringing everyday waste managers and emergency managers into discussion with one another allows realistic waste disposal expectations to be built into emergency management plans. Bringing agencies together regionally also allows emergency managers and waste managers to learn from their counterparts in other places who have dealt with waste materials and volumes generated by disasters. Managers and responders can learn from those who have been through specific disaster contexts before about how to address technical issues with recycling, composting, and other non-landfill disposal options – as well as how to do so in ways that allowed successful cost reimbursement.

Additionally, interagency relationships help to increase understanding of any institutional arrangements for recycling or composting established during ‘blue skies’ times. For example, one county practitioner pointed to existing local requirements to sort construction and demolition debris for ‘materials that are potentially recyclable.’ They go on to say, ‘that [recycling] requirement would probably be waived in an emergency declaration … but I think that just having that capacity in the region will make [the recycling] conversation a little bit more important.’ Our findings show that places with pre-existing recycling laws are perceived as the most successful disaster waste recycling operations in our sample. They had facilities, established economic markets, and contracts that operated during ‘blue skies,’ which facilitated acceptance of materials after incidents. Such examples provide promise that establishing relationships to produce rules and regulations during ‘blue skies’ might be a partial solution to overcoming the urgency/sustainability tension during disasters, as discussed by Olshansky (2006).

Finally, an operational space for this relationship-building is needed. Preplanning activities and tabletop exercises of existing disaster management plans is the primary place where informal interlevel and interagency relationship-building currently takes place. When smaller municipalities can be included, more benefits are seen. In general, our work provides further evidence that formalizing regular and deliberate relationship-building events could have positive effects on DWDM actions:

Where [response] works very well, I would say [is] our partnership with EPA. Since we’re working with them day in day out, we have relationships, we understand the differences between federal law and policy and state law and policy. That works really well, and we can get together and play very well together in Unified Command and make decisions. (State practitioner)

The workarounds identified through this qualitative research help generate a map of potential points of intervention pre-and post-incident that can be productively changed to improve debris disposal decisions and outcomes. Supporting disaster debris removal through attention to social processes complements and is, indeed, essential to government actors being able to take advantage of the support offered through technical models and data.

Conclusions

The current trend in the United States of increasing frequency and intensity of climate-related disasters and compound incidents with cascading consequences means that communities around the country are dealing with novel-to-them waste streams. Disaster waste clean-up is a logistically, emotionally, organizationally, and financially challenging process. Despite its significance to response and recovery, disaster waste has been understudied in both the hazards and disaster literature and in the waste and discard studies literature. To date, DWDM has been approached primarily as a series of operational steps and technical decisions, with social considerations as one more input into decision-making. This article provides a deeper understanding of the forces that drive and shape DWDM decisions, including how they play out within distinct socio-material systems. Qualitative research with government actors exposes social processes that shape decisions, integrates the social and material aspects of disaster waste within an operational framework, and reveals and describes in-the-field workarounds to perennial DWDM challenges. Future work can continue to explore broader social structures and systems at work in DWDM socio-material contexts.

Key policy highlights.

• Waste materials often take sub-optimal pathways to final disposal, rather than following existing guidance.

• Relationship-building among agencies across levels of government helps state and local actors navigate complicated institutional arrangements, fostering more sustainable waste pathways.

• The disconnection of waste management and disaster management institutional arrangements sends waste down sub-optimal clean-up pathways.

• Relationship-building among agencies at the same level of government bolsters capacity to manage novel waste types and volumes.

• While money plays a significant role in determining debris removal pathways, a principal driver for on-the-ground decisions is not cost comparison, but rather reimbursement as a social process.