The failure of environmental regulation in New York

This study uses public-domain documents to describe the complicity of government actors (including current and former environmental regulators) with organized criminals, in facilitating crimes against the environment within two waste industries of New York State. Qualitative analysis results indicate that a combination of changing market forces, inadequate environmental regulation, and various failed policies and practices of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation can explain the presence, activities, and resilience of organized crime in the construction and demolition debris disposal, and also medical waste incineration industries, as well as provide some preliminary recommendations for preventing further regulatory failure in that state.     

Is technology transfer more than a “mechanical” process?

Editorial Advisory Board     

Elemental analysis of human cremains using ICP-OES to classify legitimate and contaminated cremains

The Tri-State Crematory Incident in Nobel, GA (February 2001) revealed limitations in traditional human cremated remains (cremains) analytical methodology. The goal of this study was to develop a method for effectively classifying questionable sets of cremains as legitimate or contaminated. Eighty-eight samples of known human cremains, concrete, mixtures of the two, and questionable sets of cremains were acid digested and analyzed for 21 elements by Inductively Coupled Plasma-Optical Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-OES). Variable cluster and principle component analyses identified the seven elements (Sb, B, Li, Mn, Sr, Tl, and V) used to develop discriminant functions to classify questionable sets into two groups: cremains and concrete. The discriminant analysis shows that at the 0.90 probability level, mixtures of 50% or less human content were classified as concrete. Mixtures with 90% human content classified as cremains. Sixty percent and 75% human content mixtures remained in the questionable classification, but as the concentration of human increased in the mixture, the probability of assignment to the known cremains group increased. Most of the questionable human samples classified as cremains. This is a pilot study and cannot yet satisfy Daubert standards for courtroom admissibility, but it indicates that it is possible to determine the legitimacy of cremains using elemental analysis by ICP-OES coupled with multivariate statistical analysis.