Waste Management Facility Siting and Social Conflicts – the Case of Hungary

Frank Popper was the first to have used the concept of LULU (Locally Unwanted Land Uses) in 1981. LULU may refer to low-cost housing, power plants, airports, wastewater treatment plants, prisons, open-cast mines, energy supply lines, motorways, dams, oil refineries, railway lines, landfills, cemeteries, amusement parks or pubs or military facilities (Popper, 1981). Almost every major regional development project (petrol station, car repair shop, motel, parking house, rent-a-car company etc.) behaves like a LULU, and often even facilities which at first sight seem to be desired by the community (office building, residential park, luxury hotel, hospital, assembly shop, port etc.) come to the fate of LULUs. It would be very difficult to describe by one word why these facilities sometimes provoke such extraordinary resistance. Fear from physical injuries may be a motive, the same as concern about the stigmatisation of the host settlement and the consequent drop in real estate prices. Some negative impacts are certain to occur (e.g. increase in air pollution and noise load near a newly completed motorway section), whereas others have a very low occurrence probability (such as the leakage of a nuclear waste repository, for example). The negative health or economic impacts may be accompanied by negative social impacts, such as the erosion of the social networks or the often irreversible alteration of the local cultures (Lesbirel, 2003). In the context of an international comparative survey of the motives of protest against the siting of low-level nuclear waste repositories, Anna Vari and her fellow researchers came to the conclusion that concerns about undesirable facilities typically fall into five categories: the opponents of the repositories expressed health and safety, economic, environmental and social as well as technical and decision-making-related concerns (Vari et al., 1991). In addition to LULU, another commonly used acronym in connection with the siting of facilities of the above type is NIMBY, i.e. not in my backyard. For the purpose of completeness, let me mention that in addition to the two well-known acronyms (LULU and NIMBY), new ones have also appeared in the technical literature and the media, such as NOPE (Not on Planet Earth) or BANANA (Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody). The NIMBY phenomenon carries an important additional meaning relative to LULU: it is used mainly to denote investments considered reasonable even by the opponents of the facility (a refuse incinerator, for example, which is necessary at national or regional level, and the absence of which could threaten waste management), who question only why it needs to be built in their backyards and not elsewhere (Sjoberg–Drottz-Sjoberg, 2001).