A long-planned water resiliency project in South County now hangs in the balance after the city of Arroyo Grande made a formal demand to Pismo Beach and Grover Beach to amend a shared operating agreement threatening to otherwise withdraw from the project. The Arroyo Grande City Council voted unanimously at its April 13 meeting to send the demand letter to its partner cities on Central Coast Blue, a wastewater project that seeks to balance the Santa Maria Valley Groundwater Basin, a shared regional water source. click to enlarge File Photo By Aidan McGloin
HIGH STAKES Water Systems Consulting Engineer Dan Heimel leads a 2019 tour of a water recycling facility. The Central Coast Blue project would inject treated wastewater into the Santa Maria Valley Groundwater Basin.
Since the foundation of the country, every successive South African government has, at least in its rhetoric, sought to make the country a leading industrialised nation. Each has achieved modest results – if any. Simply put, industrialisation refers to an economy’s diversification from agricultural output towards sophisticated manufacturing of products. The primary attraction of industrial activity is that it acts as a major job creator and can help a country carve out its niche in the global value chain.
Industrialisation may be measured by the number of a country’s workforce involved in advanced production; the share of manufactured goods in its total exports; or by the share of the same products in gross domestic product (GDP). At its peak, South Africa’s manufacturing contribution to GDP stood at nearly a quarter. That was in 1982. It has since steadily declined to 11.7% today.
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While a litter problem is not new to Pismo Beach, city officials said the pandemic has exacerbated the situation, and now they are seeking new solutions.
In recent meetings, the Pismo Beach city council has been talking trash literally. Ben Fine with the Pismo Beach public works department said the city has been facing an unprecedented trash problem ever since the start of the pandemic, and overflowing trash bins have been giving people the emotional permission to litter.
“So even if I’m not a litterer, once I see that a trash can is full, it kind of gives me the permission to either set my trash right next to the trash can or put it on top or just not deal with it properly,” Fine said.
Despite COVID-19 and the resulting travel restrictions and stay-at-home orders, Pismo Beach has actually been busier than usual throughout the pandemic. The excess of visitors combined with an increased reliance on takeout food orders and the completion of Pismo s pier plaza, according to city staff, have created a citywide trash problem. One of the big things that we saw was that restaurants moved to a takeout-only model, and they didn t have trash facilities, Public Works Director Ben Fine said at the Jan. 19 Pismo Beach City Council meeting. And so when you look at the amount of trash generated by the takeout food versus the number of cans that we had, there was an imbalance. There was much more trash than we re capable of really collecting and storing between pickups.
7Qs for Academics: Rosimina Ali
11 December 2020 - SCIS
Today we speak to Rosimina Ali, a Researcher in Economics at the Institute for Social and Economic Studies, (IESE)
This is an ongoing series where we introduce some key researchers and academics getting to understand their work, their developing research interests as well as what keeps them engaged.
Explain the nature of your work and/or how it relates to inequality.
My research focuses on the political economy of labour markets, social reproduction and economic transformation within the context of capital accumulation with particular focus on Mozambique. This area involves an analysis of labour markets at three fundamental levels: (i) global trends and conditions, (ii) patterns and dynamics of both productive and reproductive work, in physical and digital spheres, and (iii) the inter-relations and intersections between and within the two dimensions. At each of these levels, types of work and employment, social conditions