When developing a facility to manage materials as potentially hazardous to human health and the environment as POPs, it is critical to inform the public about the methods under consideration and consult them for their input.  Their concerns and issues need to be identified and addressed in a timely, systematic, and complete manner.  Moreover, members of the public often have expertise and ideas that prove valuable to the development process.

There are several types of public consultation that thermal treatment facility planners can choose to employ or which national, local, or international donor agencies require they utilize. These can be seen as either levels or stages of public involvement; they include public information, involvement/participation, consultation, and mitigation/compensation. The level selected will depend on the project, the specific regulatory requirements for planning and permitting HWMFs, and the legal and cultural contexts for public involvement in the country.

The public involvement program should be designed to be implemented systematically and integrally throughout the thermal treatment facility development process; to meet the regulatory requirements and planning needs of the site selection, EIA and facility permitting processes; and to be continued in some form throughout the facility operation and closure periods.

Step 5.1 Identify Project Stakeholders and Determine Their Needs and Desires

Using principles of ethnography, social scientists and planners can identify the different groups of people in a given community or region; how they are organized relative to their economy, land use and environment; what their general needs and desires are; what stake they are therefore likely to hold in the proposed project; and how they have organized or are likely to organize themselves relative to involvement in the project. 

Stakeholder groups can include, among others: those living immediately adjacent to the proposed facility; the industries who would send their wastes to the facility; the government regulatory authorities responsible for overseeing the development and operation of the facility on behalf of the public; and local non-governmental organizations, or “NGOs”, with environmental or social missions, e.g., the Worldwide Fund for Nature. 

Step 5.2 Design and Implement Public Involvement Program

Based on the knowledge gained in Step 5.1, design a public involvement program that has not only a central strategy for involving the general public, but also individual components for soliciting and addressing the concerns and issues of the individual stakeholder groups previously identified. At the minimum, the program should provide public notification and information, which can be in the form of providing public notice in the mass media describing the project and its planning process and making project documents available on government websites and in public libraries. A more effective approach would be to allow public participation or involvement in the planning process by allowing the public to review and comment on project documents and to hear about and comment on the project at public meetings or hearings. The most involving level or stage is public consultation where the public is given more of a decision-sharing role in the project. 

All of these approaches can lead to proposing mitigation measures to avoid, eliminate, or reduce the likely negative impacts of the project and, where mitigation is not possible, it may be appropriate to propose measures to compensate the affected stakeholders either directly by monetary means or indirectly through provision of community facilities, parks, etc.