New doctoral thesis: "Trash is just treasure in the wrong place: The social metabolism of waste in Grenada"

Dr. Allison Elgie successfully defended her doctoral dissertation titled "Trash is just treasure in the wrong place: The social metabolism of waste in Grenada" on 23 November 2021 at the University of Waterloo, Canada. The thesis was supervised by Prof. Simron Singh (with Drs. Mary Louise McAllister, John Telesford, and Derek Armitage). The external examiner for this work was Prof. Callie Babbitt, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA. Based on 8-months of fieldwork in Grenada, this dissertation investigates the impacts and threats of solid waste on Grenada, a small island state in the Caribbean. It applies a socio-metabolic approach to answer the question: What opportunities exist for islands to sustainably manage their waste? This dissertation makes a key contribution to the literature by looking at both the material and socio-cultural aspects of waste management to provide a comprehensive, systems-based analysis of waste management as a problem within a social-ecological system. The Material Flow Analysis (MFA) part of the work was published in 2021 as a journal article in RCR (Resources, Conservation, and Recycling). The full dissertation is available here.