D-waste is here - Join us

Dear friends and colleagues

I am really happy to inform you that something I was dreaming and planning for almost two years, something that I have shared with a lot of you as an idea, it has finally been realized.

D-waste is here and you can see it at www.d-waste.com. D-waste is a global initiative that aims to make waste management easily available, with just one click, to everyone.  D-waste is an effort to upgrade waste management in the global agenda and increase the awareness about it. This is why our moto is “Waste Management for everyone” (please read the relevant report).

 And when we say everyone, we mean it. This is why D-waste will sponsor eight (8) scientists from developing countries to attend the ISWA 2012 World Solid Waste Congress. You have just to fulfill the application available in the web-site– the beneficiaries will be announced until the end of June.

D-waste is a call for action in order to create a global interactive network of waste management experts that will circulate know-how in all different formats. It is a dream, to create a massive collaboration through the Web which will be capable to overlap the barriers for sound waste management, especially to the countries that suffer more.

Visit the web-site and you will understand more about D-waste.

You can download reports and presentations (some for free, others for a price). You can have applications for your mobile phones (currently for the Android market but very soon for the i-phone market too). You can play with our inforgraphics (remember you need double click). You can ask for specific services, including project support, mentoring and helpdesk.

But most importantly you can Ask or Publish whatever you require or whatever you have to offer. And if you like the idea and the concept, please Join us, as an expert, as an author or as a blogger, we are looking for partners worldwide.

I am waiting for your feedback - I am sure that we have a lot to share - and soon, D-waste will have some surprises…For free and for everyone.

Join us at this new but promising adventure - after all D-waste is a very interesting experiment.

It is an experiment that aims to prove that the meaning of sustainability must be reconsidered, for both the world and the enterprises. Let’s D-waste…  

Let's speak about Waste To Energy...

Since I joined ISWA, almost 13 years ago, one of the best things that ISWA offered me is the opportunity to meet some guys like the one who is interviewed today, Mr. Hakan Rylander, CEO of the SYSAV Company Group. I would say that SYSAV is a role model company in WtE so I consider a visit to its web-site (www.sysav.se) as a very intersting one.

Hakan is my good friend and one of the guys that I really admire - sometimes I wish to become like him when I grow up and become more mature. For the time being I appreciate both his straight forward way as well as the fact that he is the type of "better do it than say it". As for his know-how, he is one of the most experienced WtE engineers I know, involved in all different phases and aspects of a WtE facility. 

 Besides being ISWA's president between 1996-98, Hakan has held many other key-positions e.g. Chairman of the ISWA WtE Working Group, Swedish Representative in the Nordic Association of Waste Management, Chairman of the Scania Society of Engineers. Currently Hakan is also running the R&D Committee of Avfall Sverige. So here comes his interview, I am sure you will enjoy it. Hakan, thanks a lot for your thoughtful answers...

 “Hakan, you are working for 40 years in the waste management industry and you have passed from several crucial positions, including your ISWA presidency few years ago. So I would say that for me and   my readers this a perfect opportunity to utilize your broad experience and address some key-issues that are discussed worldwide. So let's start with your operational experiences running one of the best incinerators in Europe. What were the most difficult problems you faced?

I have actually been running two large waste-to-energy plants, one in Gothenburg between 1993-96 and now the large one here at Sysav in Malmö.  Both plants are working in an excellent way, where we in both cases focused on a “conservative” concept, with a well established and proven technology, with steam figures of 400 degrees centigrade and 40 bars to minimize the risk for corrosion. Let us focus on the Sysav-plant, which I know the best today. When building the two new furnaces we put a lot of effort and time on the specification of requirements to be fulfilled by the suppliers, with a high accessibility, a high reliability and a plant easy to maintain. We also looked for the best and reliable flue gas cleaning system to be able to meet with all emission directives on a European and National level with a very good and safe margin in order to avoid all anxiety from the public and the neighbours of the plant. And of course, to an acceptable and low price. The big challenge was to "marry" the three big suppliers of boiler, flue gas cleaning and turboset so the deliveries fitted in time to each other and so we could handle the strong wind of southern Sweden when doing the high-raised installations.I think we managed very well in our efforts.

We have permission to incinerate 550 000 tons annually and during the last years we have been incinerating around 549 000 tons annually, we don´t cool off any heat at all. All produced energy is utilized as heat and electricity. The maintenance works as planned, taking place in the summer time when there is a low demand for heat. The emissions are far below the permitted levels. The big challenge when constructing and buying the new furnaces was to get an efficient, reliable plant to an acceptable price and we managed. Our gate fee is very competitive.

We didn´t have any problems with the public opinion when building the two last furnaces. The big problems came up already in 1973 when building the first two furnaces. There had never been any waste-to-energy plants in the Malmö-region before that and the plans and the building of a waste incineration plant caused a lot of objections and discussions from the public, NGOs and neighbours. Finally, Sysav got the permission and after that we have not had any problems. That is due to the very good results we have achieved in producing and delivering heat to the district heating system of Malmö and the very low emissions from the plant. When asking for permission for the two new furnaces we had an excellent reference in the two old ones. We have also all the time been very open in our information about the operation and the results we have achieved. We also invite people to visit our plant to see what actually happens and take place in a waste-to-energy plant.

To be successful when working with the public opinion I am completely convinced that you have to have an early, very honest and open dialogue with them. Don´t try to “hide” anything. Invite them to participate in the process and keep them informed. Present good references.

So what is the role of an incinerator in an integrated waste management system? Is it in competition with recycling or no?

Sysav WtE Plant

The answer is very easy to be given. There is no competition at all between recycling of materials and waste-to-energy, on the contrary the two methods complement each other.

The waste problem can´t be solved by using one method, you have to use them all – reuse, recycling, biological treatment, waste-to-energy and landfilling – in accordance with the EU Hierarchy.

Within Sysav we are working with all these methods. Last year we received 903 000 tons of different kinds of waste, 98% were recycled as materials and energy, only 2% was landfilled (22 000 tons). Less than 1% of the household waste was landfilled. We have by working in this way prolonging the remaining life time of our landfills with about 30 years. I have very strongly during the years believed that this is the correct way of dealing with waste as long as it exists, and I think the Sysav-results proof that it is a successful way.

Is incineration applicable to developing countries? Which are the conditions for a success?

Incineration should not be the first option in developing countries. It must start with a well managed landfill with methane gas recovery, material recycling with source separation and biological treatment of food waste with production of biogas and a bio-fertilizer. Such a concept would be the best for the environment and for the climate. With the present technolgy within waste incineration a lot of heat has to be cooled off in developing countries. You can of course produce electricity with higher effiecency in comparison with recovering heat as well as electricity as we do in the Nordic countries, but still a lot of heat is cooled away. The situation will improve significantly if you have a neighbouring industry or any other big activity/business with a demand for steam or heat.

Technically speaking, what can we expect from the technology in terms of improvements?

The big technical challenges with the present technology are today three and where we will improve:

- to reduce and minimize the amount of bottom ash. After the waste-to-energy process there still is about 20% of bottom ash as a residue. That means that there still is too much of unburnable waste coming to the waste-to-energy plants. We have to significantly reduce that amount to be more efficient in recovering energy and minimize the environmental problems of the residues.

- to develop a safe and environmentally correct way of final handling of the flue gas cleaning residues and to recover as much as technical and economically possible of the metal content in these residues and in the bottom ash

- to increase the electrical efficiency in the waste-to-energy plants. With high prices for electricity the power production should increase. Based upon some successful cases from some new European waste-to-energy plants. I would not hesitate to increase the steam figures above 400 degrees and 40 bars when building a new plant.
Last but not least, in a recent discussion I heard, probably for the 100^th time in last two years, that incineration is dead and that gasification and plasma pyrolysis will soon substitute all incineration plants. What is the current status of those technologies? Are they applicable for Mixed MSW? Are there commercial applications and operational experiences? After all,  is it something we can trust?

6.      A lot of people say they are promising and they are more environmental friendly than incineration...

Sysav WtE Plant 

Well, I guess I have heard the same thing at least as many times as you Antonis. 

I remember when I joined the business in the 1970-ies that there was a big belief that gasification, pyrolysis and the plasma technology would be the “salvation” of the waste problem. A number of companies introduced gasification and pyrolysis technologies, just slightly different from each other. All the different methods had worked in a very good way when testing them in a small scale, feeding the reactors with a small, very well prepared amount of waste each time. The problems came when scaling up the technology. 

A number of plants were built in Europe and a number of efforts were done to successfully scale up the technology. However, it didn´t work anywhere unless you had a very very homogenous input of fuel to the reactors. Waste is not a homogenous fuel. It has so far turned out to be too heterogenous to be able to treat in a gasification or pyrolysis process, irrespective of how you pre-treat the waste. It is absolutely not applicable for mixed MSW with today's technology. Another very negative factor is that the energy balance very often has turned out to be negative.

It would, from an environmentally point of view, be an excellent method if it worked, with low emissions and with a very small and environmentally safe residue, but unfortunately the situation today and the experiences are the same today as almost 40 years ago, even if there have been and still are efforts to introduce gasification and pyrolysis on the market.

When planning for the two new furnaces in the Sysav-plant there were proposals and some efforts that we should change from conventional grate incineration to gasification. I said absolutely “No”, but to be fair to those who believed that gasification was the best technology we decided to carry out a study and a comparison between the two technologies. The answer was very clear: gasification would result in a negative energy balance. I am happy to say that we made the right decision, our results and experiences from the grate technology gives the answer.

I absolutely don´t want to be negative, it would be fantastic if the gasification and pyrolysis technology will develop in such a way that you can use it for MSW , with a clear positive energy balance and working in a safe way for those working at the plant.

I remember when I as a young person in the waste business, full of belief in new methods and technologies, in the middle 1970-ies participated in a very good conference in Antwerp about waste management. There was a whole session about gasification and pyrolysis and I was full of enthusiasm, expecting a lot from the different presentations. On the way in to the conference room I walked beside an older gentleman and colleague from Germany. I told him about my expectations and he looked very friendly upon me telling me that he had started to work with R&D within waste management already in 1922 at the Batelle Institute in Frankfurt, and the task was to gasify/pyrolyse waste in a better way than could be done in a waste incineration plant. He told me that they without any success had been trying to do so and that he still had very little faith gasification/pyrolysis could be developed and turn out to be a successful technology for waste. 

I was of course very disappointed to hear this, but still believed it was the technology for the future handling of waste. The bad experiences coming up very soon after that conference and all the failures and unsuccessful efforts since then has made me very skeptical.

Unfortunately, I believe there is a long way still to go, but we shouldn´t give up our efforts."

Coming back from Haiti

Sometimes photos say as much as thousands words. Here are some photos form Port Au Prince, the capital of Haiti. I uploaded not the worst as I saw in Port Au Prince and not the best of course.
As IDB colleagues told me, a lot of the disaster waste has been removed and the situation in collection of waste and cleaning - beautification of the city has been recently improved.
However, despite recent imrpovements, the situation remains very risky for the public health and it seems that there is no easy way out, due to several political, insitutional and of course  economic - financial barriers.

 The conditions I met in Port Au Prince, an urban complex of more or less 2,5 million people, are probably better that the rest of the country, while some other cities like Cap-Haitien and Gonaives are facing much more serious waste collection and disposal problems.

Scavenging, as it is obvious at the photos, is an activtity for thousands people in Port of Prince, not only around the landfill but also in many small and bigger waste disposal points within and around the city.

 However, plastic bottles are almost 100% recycled, due to a local industrial firm which has developed a relevant technology.

The same is true for the plastics and metal pieces that are found within the debris waste. It is supposed that within next 6-10 months all the debris waste will have been removed, although the standards for their current disposal are not always suitable. Soon I will have more information about it.

Last but not least, it seems that the main problem related waste management is a cohesive strategic approach that will unify all the involved parties (goverments, donors, banks, NGOs etc.). Although IDB has started a valuable project to rearrange waste collection, provide institutional development and radically imporved waste disposal with a new sanitary landfill, several local conflicts and controversial strategies create at least barriers and serious delays.

Next days I will write more details about the Troutier dumpsite and the informal sector there. Until then, I ask everyone to think more about it. Can we do something for Haiti? Can we support a waste management change? And how this could be done? 

ORBIT Conference 2012: Global assessment for organic resources and waste management

 

This is a contibution by Anne Trémier, a colleague I met during the Summer School on Biological and Thermal Treatment of Municipal Solid Waste, in Napoli, Italy, 2-6 May 2011 (see http://www.iat.unina.it/summerschool/home.html). Anne is a researcher at IRSTEA (see http://www.irstea.fr/en/home-page ) and one of the organizers of the upcoming ORBIT 2012 Conference which is dedicated to "Global assessment for organic resources and waste management: Assessment of technologies for optimal organics management processes and enlightened environmental policies". 

I am sure it will be one more succesful ORBIT conference and I will be there to join ORBIT's efforts. Here is what Anne wrote:

"During the last years, a big strength has been put on organic resources recovery in order to achieve our aspiration towards a "Recycling Society" and climate stabilisation. Energy, nutrients and organic matter needs have thus driven sustainable management of resources and wastes and promoted new technological developments. In this context, biological processing of organic wastes and the use of natural resources to recover nutrients as phosphorus, to produce soil improvers and to supply energy is of great interest. 

However rules on the management of organic resources waste are fragmented and the current legislation in Europe might be not sufficient to achieve the stated objectives of its effective management. Moreover there is an open question on the tools that can be used to assess the efficiency of organic resources and waste management systems and lead to the adequate processes selection. Especially the increasing use of Life Cycle Assessment tools has to be carefully addressed with a special focus on the considered indicators and the local applicability of the results.

Following the ORBIT conferences tradition, ORBIT2012 will deal with all aspects of organic resources and waste management with a special focus on the assessment of technologies with environmental, social and economical point of view. A large place will be given to climate change, waste management assessment and decision tools. Traditional themes as energy recovery (Biofuels, biogas, hydrogen production), biological treatments (composting and anaerobic digestion) and also mechanical biological treatment still remain central issues that have to be discussed in order to improve technologies and product quality, especially for land application. 

More local management systems such as home and community composting will also be discussed as they may represent solutions that have to be considered in an integrated organic waste management plan. Special emphasis will also be laid on EU policies and strategies for sustainable organic waste management. The conference will present high quality and innovative research in all the aforementioned topics and will include oral presentations (about 180), poster presentations (about 50) and a specific workshop: “From Waste to Product – Sustainable Management of Organic Resources in Europe » .

We will be pleased to welcome you to the next ORBIT in June 12^th – 15^th 2012 in Rennes, France ( www.orbit2012.fr )". 

Asbestos: A verdict with worldwide consequences!

It was February 14^th, 2012, when a historic decision was made by an Italian Court in Turin.

After a 12 years legal procedure and investigation, Stephan Schmidheiny (65 years old), owner of the Swiss-Belgian industrial group Eternit (ETEX), which was in turn a major shareholder of the Italian subsidiary of Eternit between 1976 and 1986 and the Belgian Baron Jean-Louis de Cartier de Marchienne (90 years old), who was a director and minority shareholder of Eternit Italy, they were both sentenced to 16 years prison by an Italian court in Turin. 

Of course the verdicts are not effective until final, meaning the defendants have the right to go to a Court of Appeal and to the Supreme Court before they must undergo their verdicts.

Schmidheiny and Cartier de Marchienneare considered responsible for the death of 3.000 Italians, including employees, family members and other persons in the vicinity of Eternit’s four factories in Italy. Each of them is entitled to compensations of 95 million € for victims and their families, municipalities and regional authorities, independently of the compensations that the company will be entitled.

The initial investigation started in 1999, after victims’ associations, municipalities involved (Casale Monferatto and Cavagnolo), regional authorities (Piemonte) trade unions and insurers filed a case against the company and its responsible directors.

If you want to find full details of the case, please visit the dedicated blog asbestos in the dock 

I really believe that this is verdict with global consequences.

As far as I know this is the first decision that recognizes so serious and huge consequences of inappropriate solid waste management! It creates new standards about what should be considered safe and environmental sound working environment and about environmental impacts to the neighborhoods.

It also recognizes the importance of the time horizon: inappropriate solid waste management creates serious environmental and health impacts for decades after the completion of waste management activities!

Last but not least, the case is very important because through web – connections and blogs it was globally followed by almost sixty asbestos victims associations. The efforts of the Italian association were fully supported by top experts from different countries, asbestos lawyers shared crucial information on a global scale and the international asbestos community became stronger and more connected. The case will allow asbestos victims worldwide to gain access to evidence that was previously either unknown or simply unavailable.

I think that the waste management community has to celebrate about that decision. And decision – makers, governments, municipalities, operators and companies have to re-think the importance they give (or do not give) to waste management procedures and activities…

Emerging waste management systems: ISWA/APESB conference in Angola, June 25-28, 2012

We are all aware of the importance of waste management in developing countries. Even more, we are all aware of the fact that the countries who need desparately appropriate waste management services and infrastructure in order to provide an elementary level of health and environmental protection are the ones who do not and sometimes can not have them, because they are trapped in the environment - poverty nexus.

But this has already started to change in Africa.

I was very glad to join efforts with my friend Mario Russo (the actual leader of the initiative) and other friends worldwide for the first ISWA event in Africa.

 Lobito, a beautiful city of the Benguela Province of Angola hosts the first International AFRICA Sustainable Waste Management Conference, an event organized by ISWA together with APESB (Association of Portuguese Sanitary and Environmental Engineering) and CPLP (Community of Portuguese Language Countries) with the high sponsorship of the government of Angola. It is the first time that an event in this field is organized by ISWA in Africa. It is an opportunity to share experiences with African technicians and decision makers helping them to search out for appropriated solutions for various and specific cultural, finance and technological contexts.

Angola is one of the most important countries of Africa located on the West coast of Southern Africa. It extends over an area of 1 246 700 Km².

The economy of Angola is based in oil production. In fact, this sector makes up over 90% of the Country’s exports. Angola is currently the second oil producer of Africa with 1.8 million b/d output, and it is expected that by next year it will overtake Nigeria, with a current output of 2.3 million b/d. Second to oil, diamonds are Angola’s main export product. The country is growing up more than 7% per year and many investments are announced by government in the waste sector, sanitation and construction sector.

Lobito is an important city in the Angolan context, quite calm safe and nice city with about 450.000 inhabitants. Located in the center of the country, is a very touristic city, with wonderful beaches and surroundings. Near the city, about 17 km, Benguela is the capital of the province, also a nice city. Both cities were improved related to accommodations and other touristic infrastructures due to the organization of the CAN 2009 (African Football championship) by Angola and are ready and enthusiastically to receive this important congress.

Join us for this interesting event, definitely you will meet very interesting people and a state - of the - art scientific program. For more details please visit the conference's web-site Africa Sustainable Waste Management Conference

Marine Litter: not just an environmental threat but an economic catastrophe too

Source: Ecopaparazzi

I am sure that everyone knows about the problem of ocean plastics. This is one of the most important global waste management problems. Just think about it for a while. Here are some facts:

• The average concentration is estimated around 46.000 plastic pieces/ sq. mile

• There are cases where plastic waste is 6 times more than the plankton 

• It is estimated that 10% of the global plastic production ends up in the ocean  

• It is considered that there are more than 7.000.000 tons of plastic floating around the world 

The vast majority of the ocean plastics originates from the land activities and not from the sea transport. And a big part of it is a kind of leak from advanced waste management systems, like the USA and  the Japanese one.

Few years ago, during a key-nore lecture in 2009 ISWA's conference in Lisbon, I concluded that the problem of ocean plastics is an indicator of our global inefficiency to manage waste in an environmental sound way even in what we consider advanced waste management systems! And this becomes more and more true, as the time goes by without any actual solution to that problem (for more see the 5gyres website). 

But now, there is evidence that ocean plastics and marine litter are not onluy a serious environmentla threat bot also an environmenttal catastrophe!

A recent study (McIlgorm A., Campbell, H.F., Rule, M.J., 2011, The economic cost and control of marine debris damage in the Asia-Pacific region. Ocean & Coastal Management. 54: 643-651) has now estimated that marine litter in the Asia-Pacific region is likely to cost over US$1.26 billion per year in damage to marine industries.  

The study focused on the economic effects of marine debris in the Asia-Pacific region and calculated the cost of damage to marine industries for the 21 economies in the region. Marine industries (shipping, tourism and fishing) are estimated to be worth 3% of GDP for this region and, based on available statistics from Japan, it is believed that 0.3% of marine sector GDP is lost through debris damage. For example, if floating objects become entangled in ship propellers, or engine cooling systems become blocked, time available for fishing is reduced, while maintenance and repair costs increase. The tourism industry can also suffer if littered beaches deter visitors or development.


Based on these assumptions, the study estimated the cost of damage to marine industries to be US$1.26billion per year. This is very likely to be an underestimate as data on marine debris are lacking. However, it clearly highlights the significance of the issue. Debris is also harmful to wildlife, and can therefore reduce ecosystem services - this is another important indirect cost to consider, but as there is presently no market value for these services, the study did not calculate these costs.


Further calculations suggest that the cost of clearing up plastic waste in this region, whether at sea or on beaches, amounts to $1500 per tonne of waste, on average, although costs of individual clean-ups vary considerably ($100-$20,000 per tonne) depending on the type of waste and method.


The costs of damage and clean-ups need to be weighed up against the costs of prevention, say the researchers, and setting a policy target for achieving an optimal level of waste at sea would be more economically feasible than a zero waste target. 

Community-based voluntary approaches, such as anti-litter campaigns, are also popular, but the study argues that greater efforts are needed to change public behaviour. Market-based instruments are less well used in marine litter prevention, but the study suggests they could play a role in some cases. Possible instruments to reduce overall rates of waste production include deposit-refund schemes, taxes on plastic goods to discourage purchase, and encouragement of recyclable packaging.

Waste management in global cities

This is the first post of two that address the issue of waste management in global cities and megacities.I will try to resume some of my major findings during last two years. There will be a special event dedicated to waste management and global cities at the World Cities Summit 2012 and soon the whole program will be available - as far as I know top speakers are included. 

My research was in the framework of the ISWA project “Globalization and waste management” which is going to be presented in Florence 2012 Conference (see the excellent web-site) for the first time. ISWA;s Task Force has worked in four different packages namely a. megacities and waste management b. informal sector as a global stakeholder c. global recycling markets and d. international aid tools and their utilization.

Although the project is still on - going and there is a lot of work to be done until we will have complete it, there are some key-issues that I have concluded, especially about  global cities, which means cities that are highly interconnected in the globalization network. Some of the things I learnt have been already presented during ISWA 2011 conference in Daewoo, South Korea (see ISWA's knowledge base and search for megacities). 

Studying the triangle “Globalization – Megacities – Waste Management”  my major conclusion is that a waste management system in a global city or a megacity is much more than a local system because a. It is part of the global network of material flows b. It is highly affected by global consumerism trends and c. it is directly influenced by global regulations and initiatives related to waste management. Of course someone would easily complete that this is also true for other smaller or less globalized cities but this does not affect the core of the conclusion.

That complex dynamics between global and local markets, global and local governance, global and local stakeholders is a key issue for understanding waste management in  global cities.

As a result in megacities and global cities institutional development, social support and participation and financial sustainability (or the Software elements of waste management) are becoming more and more important especially for the success of recycling, reuse and waste prevention initiatives. They are highly sensitive to the continuous change of the neighborhoods and the appearance of “cities within the city”, especially to the poorest ones where inadequate waste management practices create serious health and environmental risks. Clearly, the Software elements control the social behaviour of citizens and thus they are the most important for the success of recycling, reuse and waste prevention programs.

It seems that a major barrier comes from the complex interactions between the hundreds stakeholders involved in a global city waste management. Another serious barrier comes from the lack of initiatives to integrate informal sector to waste management activities. 

From those remarks, it is obvious that the overall performance of a global city waste management system results from continuous interactions between global and local markets, emerging social behaviour, city governance, global and local stakeholders, city growth etc. And those interactions are hardly described by the traditional waste management approaches which are based on engineering and logistics.

The problem might be more general. As long as we face SWM as a matter of appropriate storage, collection, transfer, treatment and disposal and the main effort was to minimise environmental and health impacts, engineering and logistic tools were sufficient to plan and implement waste management systems. But today, resource management and social behaviour are becoming an organic part of any waste management system and they are essential to address increasing recycling rates and better quality of recyclables, participation of industrial stakeholders, eco-design initiatives and closed loops of products and materials.

Consequently, engineering and logistic tools are not enough to plan and deliver waste management systems in global cities. Especially in a megacity, the overall waste management system should be considered as “complex system”, which means a system composed of interconnected parts that as a whole exhibit one or more properties (behaviour among the possible properties) not obvious from the properties of the individual parts.

Complexity theory and Complex Systems Science (CSS) is a relatively new field of research focused on systemic understanding, self-organization, irreducibility, emerging patterns and properties and non-linear behaviour. Complexity science has been rapidly evolved during the last 20 years for the study of complex physical, biological and social systems. Cities as a whole may be considered as emerging entities existing near a critical point of self organization, far from equilibrium and qualitatively different from their constituent residents and subsystems.

Waste management systems in global cities should be studied using complexity theory and complex systems science tools because:

• The overall performance of a megacity waste management system is the result of complex interactions between global and local stakeholders, global and local material flows, global and local recycling markets, global and local governance etc.

• Effective recycling, waste prevention and reuse programs are of high importance for a megacity since they improve self-resilience and relief waste management systems. However, those programs are directly linked with social behaviour and the emerging system performance is a result of thousands or millions daily interactions.

•  In global cities and megacities, local patterns and heterogeneity are the rule in waste management and micro-local dynamics have an impact at the system performance through their aggregate effects but also because they influence urban change iteratively through local connections and impacts.

• In metropolitan areas there are a number of councils, utilities, regional and governmental authorities, NGOs, private sector companies, informal sector unions, municipal utilities etc. Each of these entities is operating according the rules of limited awareness and jurisdiction, and self-interest and with selected connections to other entities. The dynamics of stakeholders’ interaction in megacities cannot be predicted or modelled with the usual information tools 

But is it any easy and practical way to manage Complexity in global cities? Or the ideas above are just theoretical approaches? The answer will arrive at the next post

La Pintana: an awarded solid waste project

Some months ago, during the International Conference on Waste Minimization and Recycling of the International Solid Waste Management Association (ISWA) in Buenos Aires, the IDB and the FEMSA Foundation awarded the Water and Sanitation Prize for Latin America and the Caribbean in the category of Solid Waste Management to the La Pintana Municipality of Santiago, Chile, for its strategy of source separation, selective collection, and treatment. 

During November, in an IDB seminar in Mexico, I met Gustavo and sharing I learnt more about the La Pintana project and asked him to write about it. This is what Gustavo has prepared – thanks a lot Gustavo for this contribution, I really appreciate it and I think La Pintana serves as a good example of realistic solutions for transition countries and medium size municipalities. 

"Through this project, which was developed in the framework of Local Agenda 21, in response to the challenges posed by the Kyoto Protocol, of which Chile is a signatory, so that cities will face the challenges of socio-environmental in the present century, the Municipality of La Pintana, located south of the metropolitan region, in Santiago de Chile, with 201.178 inhabitants, has been encouraging in the Commune willingness to take charge of the integrated waste management, treating directly the fraction of vegetables residues eliminating the disposal of them in the landfill, producing significant savings for the municipal budget, not only the disposal in the landfill, the Municipality also paved the way for implementing treatment facilities for these wastes, promoting recovery and treatment of them through composting and vermiculture.

The old department for Cleaning and Ornament in the municipality was transformed in the Directorate for Environment Management (DEM), This Directorate have today four units, Green areas, Environment Health, Environmental Operations and Environmental Education. To do more effective it work The DEM has divided the commune in five operative sectors, where the four units have representation like a little (mini) DEM. Through them the DEM performed their activities for Local Environment Management (GAL for their acronym in Spanish)
The DEM did en 2003 a characterization for their Municipal Solid Waste (MSW). The DEM established that the most important fraction in the MSW in La Pintana was the vegetable fraction, (more of 56% in the summer), with this reality the DEM took the resolution to do an effort to work with those waste and gave them a value, started a program when the community must separated the vegetable waste in their houses (separation at source) and give them to truck that collect this fraction. The wastes are transported to the treatment plant built at the commune center, where the wastes are treated trough composting and a reduction treatment with the Californian’s red worm (Eisenia Foetida). 
The above mentioned treatments generate two high value products, the composting and humus. These products are handled by the municipal plant nursery, used as tree, shrubbery, plant and flowers substratum, that come back to the commune in green areas, grounds parks, so improving the life quality of the people living in La Pintana.  
The mainly actors especially in this program are the inhabitants of La Pintana, without them the program can not have a real sense.  At the first time was necessary to sensitize the people of La Pintana. Explained to families, the scope of the program how to sort and deliver the vegetal fraction. Together with this work the DEM has develop an educational program free of charge for the inhabitants of the commune, this has developed a strengthened the relationship between the municipality and community. These processes easy can be replicated by any other municipality.
The sensitization reach initially around 17.000 families, In 2010 the DEM in an additional effort reached contact with other 20.000 families this gave a total of 37.000 families and this represent the 82,2% of the total inhabitants in the Commune.
As a result of this communal program the Directorate for Environmental Management can treat around the 30% of the total vegetable waste of La Pintana in their own plant for composting and vermiculture. This process has aided the commune to obtain very easy, the middle environmental certification of the Chilean ministry for environment. The commune has become a pioneer in their program for Local Environmental Management in a national level. The contribution of the DEM to a sustainable development is reflected not only in saving cost to the municipal budget generated from the process for the separation at source and their treatment as described above, but especially in a greater contribution to a better environment in Chile.
How the saving cost generated from the Directorate of Environmental Management activities, are transferred to the Social development in La Pintana?. The municipality has a sport stadium, with 22 sport schools; the young through the sport have the opportunity to avoid the drugs and delinquency. In a commune with high conflict and social problems (La Pintana is considered a homogeneously poor commune) can said that thanks to DEM work, La Pintana have a  South American champion in athletics disciplines. This has been generated by the virtuous circle of the sustainable development. Environmental work, generate economy for the municipal budget, this cost saving are transferred to the Social development of the inhabitants of La Pintana.  
The precious work of the 120 people that work at the DEM, and their contribution to a commune with scarce resources, has been awarded with several national an international awards, for example, the award from “The Peace House” in 2009. “The AVONNI 2010” (Avonni is backwards innovation in Spanish) where the DEM participate together with other 550 projects for this national award. La Pintana won with their project “Transformation of waste cooking oil in biodiesel”. In 2011 the prize granted by the IBD-FEMSA organizations, obtained the award for the good practices in Solid Waste Management. The results that the Directorate for the Environmental Management has obtained can be summarized in the following achievements:
• Diminishing of the waste volume transported to the landfill.
• Make a significant cost saving to the municipal budget.
• Change the common leave earth as substrate for a high quality composting, that bring real nutrients to the soil.
• Reuse the pruning’s remains in a creative way for the elaboration of composting.
• Minimize the loud and smog contamination, due to less trucks circulation to the landfill.
• Sensitize the community about the need to minimize the household waste
• Diminishing of the greenhouse gases, due to less transport and the use of biodiesel, because the maximum distance from each point of the commune to the treatment plant is only 1 kilometer. Compared with disposal of waste in the landfill distant 12 kilometers away from La Pintana.


Gustavo González A. 
(Ph.D.Chem.Eng). 
Manager of the treatment plant for SW. 
Directorate for Environmental Management. 
Municipality  La Pintana. Santiago-Chile."

For more see the video and the article - the video is in Spanish as well as the official  press release

Albina Ruiz: a waste side story!

This is a contribution by Alberto Huiman Cruz, from Lima, Peru, a colleague I recently met in Mexico. It is the story of the recently awarded Albina Ruiz. I have made a little search about her and I have to say that the results achieved by her efforts are really important, especially in terms of improvement of health conditions. Congratulations from my side as well.
"Albina Ruiz is not afraid of cleaning up garbage. Many of us take efficient waste removal for granted. Yet, in some parts of the world, refuse is not effectively managed. This has long been the case in Lima, Peru.

The problem was particularly severe in Lima’s northern district. In 1995, for example, its 1.6 million residents produced 600 metric tons of solid waste daily. Municipal authorities were only able to manage about half of this. The rest ended up strewn all over; it was found in the street, in the river, or in vast open dumps, invariably leading to higher incidence of disease, as well as feelings among the residents of discontent and decreased self-image.

The high levels of unemployment in the area also fueled these feelings. In order to make money, people who called themselves “recicladores” searched the dumps for recyclables that they could then sell, through an intermediary, to a recycling facility. This generated less than $2 a day for the recicladores, who wore no protective clothing and became targets of gang violence.

Albina Ruiz started her organization, Ciudad Saludable (Healthy City Group), to combat these issues. Based on ideas she originally presented in her university thesis, the organization develops waste removal and management systems that are effective and inexpensive. Through a micro-entrepreneurship model, these systems allow the recicladores to take charge of dealing with the refuse, thereby addressing their unemployment. Ruiz’s solution also involves coordinating with the public sector and increasing public awareness about the importance of waste removal.

In the last decade, Ciudad Saludable has positively impacted over 6 million people in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, and India. Ruiz has also established two new organizations: Peru Waste Innovations, and Healthy Cities International, whose goal is to replicate Ciudad Saludable’s methods and successes globally. For her work, Ruiz was elected as an Ashoka Fellow in 1996.

David Nahmias, Ashoka’s Knowledge Team liaison to North and South America, helps coordinate Venture and Fellowship in these two regions; he describes Ruiz as one of Ashoka’s most impressive and inspirational Fellows.

“When I worked as Venture Coordinator in our Mexico office, Albina came to speak with our team there,” he said. “I was captivated by how she has managed to expand her micro-entrepreneurship model throughout the world, forge strategic partnerships with large corporations, and even influence national public policy in Peru and Brazil, all while speaking very humbly about her achievements. It was at that moment when I understood in real terms the amazing potential that Ashoka Fellows have to generate large-scale systems change around the world.”

Ruiz’s commitment to improving the lives of the working poor recently attracted the attention of The Global Fairness Initiative(GFI), which was founded with the goal of promoting fair and sustainable approaches to economic development. GFI presented Ruiz with the 2011 Fairness Award on November 8.

Two weeks later, Ruiz accepted the prestigious Albert Medal at the Royal Society of Arts in London, joining a long and distinguished list of innovative pioneers that includes Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.

Ashoka, GFI, and the Royal Academy are not the only organizations to recognize Ruiz’s innovation and passion. Her efforts have been commended by Avina, the Schwab Foundation, the Skoll Foundation, PBS, and the Clinton Global Initiative, among others. In addition, she is the author of several articles and books on the subjects of community planning and disease prevention.

Despite these successes and her international reach, Ruiz maintains her connections to her roots. She can still be found combing the beaches of Lima for trash to clean up, just as she did during her university days."

Urban waste management and Climate Change adaptation

Speaking for waste management, the adaptation challenge is currently underestimated compared to the great importance that has been given to climate change mitigation issues. Taking into account that waste management is still out of the mainstream agenda of the climate change policy – makers and decision - makers, although there is evidence that sound waste management practices can deliver substantial carbon emission savings, the result is that very few measures and policies have been arrived dedicated to adaptation and waste management.

Worldwide, global cities recognize the importance of adaptation because as Barbel Dieckmann, the mayor of Bonn in 2007 put it “…cities are already experiencing flooding, water shortages, heat waves, coastal erosion and ozone-related deaths”. The lesson we learnt from the Katrina hurricane was that multiple failures of an aging and inadequate infrastructure, plus indifferent planning, sharply increased the death toll of a catastrophe that had long been predicted. And while cities are moving relatively fast to create adaptation strategies, as a kind of “reaction” to the aftermaths of Katrina hurricane, waste management is usually out of the adaptation agenda.

The importance of adapting the current waste management is high and it deserves more attention by urban planners and decision makers as well as international organizations, for many reasons.

First of all, current urban waste management systems are proven vulnerable day by day. Search a little bit at the Web and you will find lots of landfill floods and collapses due to hurricanes or extensive rainfall, collection systems collapsed or blocked for a certain period due to extreme weather events. Although for the time -being we do not have reliable data to consider, it seems that extreme weather events will become a rule (and not an exception, as it is now) for designing waste management systems in certain areas of the world.

Second, it seems that the most vulnerable waste management systems are the ones that happened to be in growing and transition megacities, where informal sector plays a certain role in waste management and infrastructure either is not in place or it is not adequate. In those urban areas, the environmental and health risks from a potential disaster related to waste management are really high and under certain conditions they might be proven more than local ones. Take into account that dumpsites, which are the dominant practice in those cases, are usually located at low levels and excavated with no plan and hydraulic protection and you will understand that this is a serious problem.

Third, even in developed and mature megacities, where infrastructure is in place, the collection systems remain vulnerable, facilities must be examined for their resilience under the new weather patterns and we still have the problem of new and old landfills. Old landfills, even if they are closed possess a serious risk, especially if they are located into floodplains. New and active landfills are by far the most vulnerable part of the waste management chain and their potential for environmental damage is really high, especially in the case of erosion or oversaturation.

Already, there are events even in developed countries that outline the serious impacts of the current underestimation of the importance of waste management adaptation strategies. As an example, 30% of 1064 Austrian landfills are in areas where flooding is a major risk. A 25.000 m3 old landfill was completely eroded during a 2005 flood of Alfenz River in Austria, resulted in water pollution events. And the famous Elbe River flood on 2002 created landfill and dumpsites erosion which contributed in heavy metal and arsenic contamination.

So it is time to change our attitude regarding the adaptation of waste management. There is one more reason about it. Mitigation efforts must be global and their global results will be long-term ones. But adaptation is something urgent that must be delivered locally and the results will be more or less immediate. In that view adapting waste management systems is within the spatial and temporal scale of human brain and of our societies’ understanding, which means is more achievable. And for awareness purposes, focusing resources and attention to adaptation strategies is the crucial link to demonstrate the importance of mitigation measures.

How to cope with this problem? It is neither easy nor simple, but there are some starting points.

First, we need to face urban waste management as a system and assess the region – city - site-specific vulnerability of it. Of course landfills, dumpsites and collection systems have to be studied in details since they are obviously the most vulnerable parts. But even before those physical elements of the waste management chain, we have to study the institutional framework in each area and the social – demographic factors related to waste management. Because actually the vulnerability map of any system will be the combination of geographical vulnerability with social – demographic factors.

Second, climate change and extreme weather events create a new diversification of regions and territories, according their vulnerability. This means that a. site selection criteria have to be updated and reflect this diversification and b. they have to be applied much stricter than they are applied now.

Third, we need to find a way to include the Low Probability – High Impacts events in the designing principles and procedures, according the expected climate change impacts in each area. This is also a challenge for studying the vulnerability of the current infrastructure in place. Appropriate risk assessment procedures should be developed for that purpose.

We need a road map to assess the adaptive capacity of urban waste management systems and to frame them within the overall city adaptation strategy. Emergency planning and medium term adaptation measures are definitely parts of the adaptation strategies and usually there have not been even discussed for urban waste management. Informal sector integration in waste management procedures might be required too.

Last but not least, it is obvious that diverting waste from landfills, using several parallel collection systems, improving recycling - recovery performance and introducing waste prevention initiatives will definitely relief the impacts from any extreme weather phenomena, especially the health and environmental impacts related to landfills and dumpsites. In that term, those measures are proven as the link between adaptation and mitigation strategies and they have to be even more upgraded than they already are for waste management policies and strategies.

The future of waste management is URBAN!

This is a short lecture I recently gave to an AIDIS event in Sao Paulo. The event was dedicated to the presentation of the excellent report of AIDIS "Waste Management in Latin America" and I really have to congratulate the organizers for the excellent report they presented. For more about AIDIS see at

http://www.aidis.org.br/htm/eng_htm/index_eng.html

For more about the event see at

http://www.aidis.org.br/htm/eng_htm/noticias_3_encontro.html

I have to thank the organizers for giving me the opportunity to contribute to a so important event and I want to ensure them that I will be on their side, available to contribute, whenever they ask for. Here are the thoughts I presented.

"...Latin America and the Caribbean is the most urbanized region in the world, with its urban population expanding from 61 percent in 1975 to more than 78 percent in 2001. With increas¬ing urbanization—along with economic growth and rising consumption—comes greater waste generation. And the waste will continue to grow: several recent World Bank studies project that the region’s municipal solid waste will increase from 131 million tons in 2005 to roughly 179 million in 2030.

Urbanization brings high growth in population, in income and unpredicted spatial growth. Urban areas in Latin America are becoming a symbiosis of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, while allowing the rise of a new middle class.

Thus, urbanization goes together with a rapid increase of the urban GDP /capita income, with decrease of average household size, increased demand for dwellings and increased informal sector markets in all the urban life, including waste management as well. One thing is for sure: more waste is coming and it will be urban.

But urbanization has also another, usually hidden, side that we have just began to understand it. Big cities have lower environmental and energy footprints than smaller ones and much lower than rural areas. Urban conglomerations deliver more results (in GDP/ capita, in productivity, in energy use per capita) with less resource. Recently it has been found that there is a so- called “super-scale effect”: double the size of a city and you will have double plus 15% efficiency in energy used, GDP/capita or any resource use. Half the size of a city and you will have a half minus 15% efficiency. This means that big cities deliver more using less and this is something that is directly linked with the social context of urban life and not with the engineering and logistics of it.

Now it is the time to utilize this particular property of urbanism for the benefit of waste management. For many years we faced the problem of waste management trying to resolve it with engineering and logistic tools. And we were right because the first objective of waste management was and it still is to protect human health, taking the garbage away of the daily city life.

As long as we face SWM as a matter of appropriate storage, collection, transfer, treatment and disposal and the main effort was to minimise environmental and health impacts, engineering and logistic tools were sufficient to plan and implement waste management systems. But today, resource management and social behaviour are becoming an organic part of any waste management system and they are essential to address increasing recycling rates and better quality of recyclables, participation of industrial stakeholders, eco-design initiatives and closed loops of products and materials.

As a result of those trends, it is obvious that the governance issues of waste management (institutional development, social support and participation and financial sustainability) are becoming more and more important especially for the success of recycling, reuse and waste prevention initiatives. They are highly sensitive to the continuous change of the neighbourhoods and cities within the megacity, especially to the poorest ones where inadequate waste management practices create serious health and environmental risks.

Clearly, the governance issues elements control the social behaviour of citizens and thus they are the most important for the success of recycling, reuse and waste prevention programs.

From those remarks, it is obvious that the overall performance of a city waste management system results from continuous interactions between global and local markets, emerging social behaviour, city governance, global and local stakeholders, city growth etc. And those interactions are hardly described by the traditional waste management approaches which are based on engineering and logistics.

So now it is the time to include social behavior and participation as an organic part of waste management, knowing that without it all infrastructure design might be proven as useless. And now there are smart tools to do it.

One of the major barriers in appropriate waste management is the lack of appropriate information for organizing waste collection, street cleaning and recycling. New emerging solutions do emerge and I think the most interesting one is to use citizens as sensors. Using smart phones applications and relevant software tools we can now have real time monitoring of all municipal activities, involving citizens not only to monitor but also to participate in decision making. This is the new era of urban waste management, a management that will be based in active and real time participation of citizens and in that way we can also open the crucial issues of waste prevention and recycling.

Of course infrastructure will always be needed – we can avoid it no matter how successful recycling we will have. But it is also time to focus at the overall cycle of waste, including the substantial cost of logistics, which represent 60-80% of our expenses for waste management. So why not to have e.g. waste treatment plans nearby the city centers? Why not to have underground transfer stations and treatment facilities?

The future of waste management is urban because cities were always and still are the major source of innovation for our societies. And through events like the one we have today, we have the opportunity to be the catalyst of this innovation."

Waste Management 2030+

This is an article I prepared for the magazine Waste Management World. It is based on my key-note lecture at ISWA´s conference in Lisbon, October 2009.

The purpose of the article is to outline the major trends and challenges that will shape the future of waste management for the next few decades. Although in our complex and unpredictable world ‘prediction is very difficult, especially about the future’ (Niels Bohr), there are certain trends and facts that more or less create the ‘bigger picture’ in which the waste management industry will evolve. Interestingly, discussion of these trends has not up till now directly linked them with waste management – at least not according to the author’s knowledge.


Putting these trends together and considering the consequences they will have for waste management, it is clear that new challenges are emerging, and the current situation must be seen in a different way. Our waste management systems and our market conditions, even at their best, are incapable of handling the growing amounts of waste globally. So unless a new paradigm of global cooperation and governance is adopted, a tsunami of uncontrolled dumpsites will be the prevailing waste management method, especially in Asia.

The whole article can be found at:

http://www.waste-management-world.com/index/display/article-display/8267238380/articles/waste-management-world/volume-11/issue-2/features/waste-management_2030.html

I hope you will enjoy it

ABRELPE is getting recognized as a key-stakeholder in Brazil

With great pleasure I visited Brazil once more, as an invited key-note speaker for ABRELPE´s seminar on waste management technologies.

Every time I come to Brazil I feel a vibrating country, people with great expectations and hopes, a booming market and a growing waste management sector. The last is certainly reflected to the great participation and publicity ABRELPE´s events have gained, with new records achieved year by year.

This time, the event organized was dedicated to the new waste management policy, a real revolutionary approach and one of the most progressive waste management laws worldwide. Reverse logistics, shared responsibility during the product life cycle, a waste hierarchy approach and integrated waste management plans countrywide are just some of the key - points that have already started to be discussed in Brazil.

The event was a big success and ABRELPE utilize it in order to present the unique publication PANORAMA 2010, which includes a detailed presentation of waste management activities in brazil and their benchmarking year by year. It also includes a summary in English and Spanish, so it is pretty useful for anyone who is interesting in Brazilian situaton regarding waste management. The whole publication can be found at:

http://www.abrelpe.org.br/panorama_2010.php

PANORAMA 2010 and the whole event were covered with great publicity. frankly, it seems that Carlos Silva Filho, ABRELPE´s managing director has gone a long way forward and now ABRELPE is not just a well placed stakeholder within waste management community - it is becoming the key-stakeholder and the main reference for waste management activities in the country. Congratulations Carlos and I wish ISWA to have more members like ABRELPE.

Needless to say that the Brazilian hospitality was as always great, which makes me again waiting for the next opportunity to visit Brazil.

Industrial recycling networks

This is from "Science for Environment Policy", Issue 200, 17-6-2010,a periodical newsletter by DG Environment.

Recycling waste products between companies in industrial recycling networks can bring environmental and competitive benefits. A recent study on whether such networks can be used to advance sustainable development more broadly suggests companies first need a clear, shared network identity before other types of sustainability-oriented cooperation can take place.

'Industrial ecology' aims to reduce the environmental impact of industry by recycling by-products and waste from one company and using them as raw material inputs (resources) for another company. The concept of industrial ecology is modelled on natural ecosystems where all materials are recycled in an efficient and sustainable manner.

These industrial recycling networks can be considered a type of 'industrial symbiosis' (IS) project. Apart from providing economic benefits to all the firms involved, the environment also benefits from reduced raw material use, waste generation and emissions.

This study conducted a survey among companies from the general manufacturing sector of Austria, as well as firms belonging to recycling networks in Styria in Austria and Oldenburger Münsterland in Germany. It sought to understand whether IS projects can be used as a starting point for much wider cooperation amongst companies in terms of sustainable development. That is, whether they encourage further environmental protection and social responsibility activities.

The survey asked about the sustainability-related aspects of inter-company recycling activities and compared responses from companies within IS projects with companies that did not belong to such networks.

Surprisingly, companies belonging to the recycling networks passed on a
significantly lower percentage of waste products for recycling than companies in the general manufacturing sector (52 per cent for other companies compared with 39 per cent for the Styria network and 36 per cent for the Oldenburger Münsterland network).
In addition, companies that are partners in the recycling networks do not view their cooperation to be different to a regular customer relationship.

In particular, none of the companies from the Styria recycling network and only two companies from the Oldenburger Münsterland recycling network were aware that they were part of a wider waste recycling network. This implies that the companies view the recycling activities as a bilateral market relationship, rather than a shared value contributing to sustainable development.

Descriptions and charts can be used to understand the materials and energy flows for recycling purposes, but they do not reveal any information about the social level of the recycling networks. This study demonstrated there was no shared network 'identity' in the Styria or the Oldenburger Münsterland recycling networks.
In order for industrial networks to encourage new ideas about sustainability and become sustainability networks, it would be necessary to first create a network identity. From this a network vision of sustainability with common objectives could be developed.

Source: Posch, A. (2010). Industrial Recycling Networks as Starting Points for Broader Sustainability-Oriented Cooperation? Journal of Industrial Ecology. 14(2): 242-257.
Contact: alfred.posch@uni-graz.at

ARS is on the way up!

As I was flying from Buenos Aires to Frankfurt I was thinking about the ARS (Argentinean ISWA National member) Beacon Conference on Sustainable landfills I just attended. And I have to say that I was happy enough considering that the event was a great success for both ISWA and ARS.

For ARS, it was an event with massive participation (up to 500 hundred people) and excellent representation of more or less all the levels of government and municipalities. What a recognition for ARS and the restless efforts that they made! It is really impressive how many people are really interesting for waste management in a country that has just started to recover from an almost lethal financial crisis.

It is more impressive if you consider that such an interest is combined with lack of financial resources that could support infrastructure development.

For me, the first real lesson of the event was that ARS influence has really started to grow, maybe faster that ARS’ people consider. The second lesson is that there is a growing need for education and training in specific waste management issues, that ARS has the capacity to cover and thus there is a huge opportunity for strengthening of it.

For ISWA, the event was a proof of the successful work and promotion made by the Regional Development Network and of the political recognition it can have.

The example of Argentina is a real Beacon for all national members that may help them to understand the real power and strength that can be utilized from their membership to ISWA. Further, the example of Argentina proves that not all matters are related with financial resources and official policies: even with their absence, an active and well networked organization can deliver a lot and gain serious recognition.

Because the real and the most important difference is made by the passion, the quality and the commitment of the people involved – we should never forget that finally and after all ISWA is and will be an NGO that promotes sustainable waste management in practice which means through and by more and more informed, educated and globally oriented human resources!

Special thanks to Ricardo, Atilio, Sole and Maria for their (as always) perfect hospitality and logistics – guys I wish we could have two or three of you more in other countries.

Last but not least: combining those really good friends with the magnificent Buenos Aires explains why every time an Argentinean event is finished I wonder when the next will be. Even in the middle of the worst financial crisis in Greece…

PANORAMA of Solid Waste Management in Brazil and RIO AMBIENTE event

I was just attended an excellent event organized in Rio de Janeiro, within the framework of RIO AMBIENTE 2010. It was a two days international seminar on waste management technologies and systems, organized by ABRELPE, the Brazilian ISWA National member.

The event was organized on a high professional level and I have to say that it was one of the very few events, at least for me, in which all speakers made substantial contributions. Needless to mention that ABRELPE and Rio stakeholders involved provided a very warm and comfortable hospitality, as it is the Brazilian mentality and habit which created familiarity between the most different type of people.

As for the event, I was surprised by the deep and intense discussions made for the future of waste management in Brazil.

I think the highlight of the event was the presentation of the 2009 edition of PANORAMA of Solid Waste in Brazil, made by Carlos Silva Filho, executive director of ABRELPE and very good friend of mine. This is an excellent publication, made every year by ABRELPE, which presents more or less all the important data and evolution in waste management on a national and regional level.

It is not only the useful statistics and the very careful design that make PANORAMA very easily utilized. It is not just the professional level of the printing and editing work. The most important aspect I think is that reading such a publication (even the English summary) you have a very good idea of what is happening in Brazil, what are the main problems and of course which may be potential solutions.

As Carlos wrote in the preface of it “…themes related to solid waste gain an increasingly larger importance in the society (so) the annual update and deepening of data, which give origin to the industry panorama, becomes an indispensable instrument for the definition of strategies addressing the industry development”.

But except the impressive PANORAMA, all major issues discussed and sometimes with a lot of details. Here are just some of them:

The new national plan for waste management with emphasis to Reverse Logistics
The need for a national network of sanitary landfills
The necessity of treatment facilities for big cities with emphasis to thermal treatment plants
The international experiences regarding waste treatment and possible models that can be adapted in Brazilian conditions
The emerging regulation changes in order to modernize recycling activities and state control
The potential and the barriers for Public – Private Partnerships
The very important and characteristic role of scavengers and favelas in Rio de Janeiro waste management.

When the event finished I really felt that waste management in Brazil and especially in Rio de Janeiro is in front of a great challenge.

As the country rapidly increases its Gross Domestic Product, with rates that for 2009 were around 7%, the waste production is really booming, as several speakers confirmed. There is a very clear danger that dumpsites will be rapidly expanded as well and several environmental and health problems might be tremendous.

Brazilian market has more or less all the components required to deliver solutions for the emerging waste disposal crisis. Brazilian government seems to understand the problem but probably is not giving yet the importance required.

The upcoming Olympic Games 2016 in Rio create a window of opportunity for delivering waste management infrastructure. In Brazil, as I have the opportunity to see with my own eyes, there are a lot of human resources (and more are already prepared) and some institutions that can provide a substantial improvement of waste management in a relevant short – time. It is their time now to grasp this opportunity and create new and more efficient and safe waste management. And I feel that ABRELPE is really a key-partner of this effort.

I hope they will succeed - it is worth for this beautiful country and its warm people.

Congratulations to ABRELPE for the event but much more for the unique PANORAMA – I wish other ISWA national members to get the idea and implement it.

Carlos and Alberto, special thanks for all your hospitality and warmness, we really felt almost like home, as every time we visit Brazil. I hope that I will provide at least a similar hospitality when you come to Greece and I am more than grateful for giving me the opportunity to interact in so well prepared and interesting events.