REPORT OF THE 2005 EDITION OF SARDINIA SYMPOSIUM
1. Introduction Sardinia 2005 started with a bang – well lots of them – a violent thunderstorm in the early hours of Sunday morning, which left many of us without power in our rooms until mid morning and several room safes became quite temperamental after that. The weather was not fully satisfying until the Saturday following the meeting, when blue sky and sunshine appeared, but we weren’t there to enjoy ourselves! Fortunately the meeting made up for this deficiency. This was the tenth symposium and it was conducted with the participation of the European Union, the United Nations Environment Programme, the United States Environment Protection Agency, the Department of the Environment of the Regional Government of Sardinia and the Department for Environmental Policies of the Regional Government of Vencice. We were given a bound copy of extended abstracts and a CD of the procedings that were chosen by a group of international referees from 720 abstracts from 66 countries. Delegates attended from 72 countries, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Participating Countries The Sardinia Symposia were estabilshed in 1987 to make innovations and experiences in the rapidly developing field of waste management readily available to professional communities worldwide. Since then, the Symposia have rapidly become an international referece forum, where every two years, planners, operators, public officials and scientists present their relevant experiences and discuss new waste management concepts and technologies. 2. The Opening Sessions As has become the custom, the symposium included poster sessions and general and specialised workshops running in parallel with the presentations in the two main halls. This creates a very busy schedule and considerable concentration is required when deciding on the presentations and workshops to attend each day. This year, for the first time, five training courses were organised for conference delegates by the International Waste Working Group (IWWG) on the Sunday preceeding the symposium. They were co-ordinated by members of the managing board of the group and covered the management of healthcare wastes, landfill design, landfill processes and emissions, leachate management and landfill gas management.
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The 2005 meeting was opened by the introductory Mercer Lecture given by Dr Jean Pierre Giroud, IGS Past President and Chairman Emeritus of GeoSyntec Consultants in the USA. His lecture, covered the use of geosynthetics in modern waste containment, geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of their misapplication. Traditionally, the Mercer Lecture is given once each in Europe, North America and the Far East. It is named after Dr. Frank Brian Mercer, inventor of original geosynthetic products and the founder of Netlon Ltd. in the United Kingdom. It is a biennial lecture that is sponsored by Tensar International with the endorsement of the International Geosynthetics Society (IGS) and the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE). The aim of the lecture is to help promote information exchange between the geotechnical engineering profession and the geosynthetics industry by giving an eminent practitioner the opportunity to undertake a lecture tour on the subject of Geosynthetics in Geotechnical Engineering. The Mercer Lecture was followed by two introductory presentations on waste management in developing countries by Christian Nels and by Laila Iskandar. This topic was one of the main themes of the 2005 meeting. It was the subject of a main session, five of the specialised sessions and one workshop. Frequently, waste management facilities in developing countries are in a poor state on accoount of lack of awareness, know-how and/or resources. They are often poorly sited, lack design and any proper form of operation. Consequently they can have a harmful effect on both the environment and on the quality of life. Technologies available in more developed countries are often not appropriate. A more effective approach can be to upgrade the facilites to a suitable standard, using sound principles and minimum resources. During the meeting some interesting case studies were presented and discussed. It is hoped that meeting provided a real opportunity for the exchange of knowledge and experience in this field. 3. Some Statistics As Figure 2 shows, some 994 people attended Sardinia 2005; the split between authors and those attending without giving presentations was roughly 50:50. This suggests that authorship may not influence attendance significantly, although it is more likely to be a factor in developing countries. Attendance seems to have stabilised at around this level each year and appears to be an ideal number for a successful symposium at this venue. The 5% of attenders who were staff were predominantly from EuroWaste srl or graduate students from Padua and Cagliari Universities. They worked extremely hard to ensure that the meeting ran smoothly.
Figure 2: Attendance
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Figure 3 below indicates that the number of abstracts received for each meeting has increased steadily over the years, as has the number accepted. There is always a difficult balance to be struck between variety of topic, quality of papers, provenance of authors and numbers attending. There is a suggestion that participants may in fact be offered too much choice and that it might be beneficial to reduce the number of parallel sessions.
Figure 3: Numbers of Papers at Sardinia Symposia 4. Workshops There were 32 workshops on a wide variety of topics ranging from waste management on islands to evapotranspiration on landfill covers. These sessions are primarily aimed at experts in the topics covered and for maximum benefit should really include only a short introductory presentation, to allow for more discussion than is possible in the main sessions. These sort of discussions are the heart of such symposia, where the real transfer of ideas, experiences and technology can occur. In some cases, related workshops ran sequentially, to maximise the time given to a particular topic. An example was the workshops on decision support tools and life cycle assessment. Firstly, a range of decision support tools was discussed particularly their benefits, limitations and uses. The following session considered one specific tool, life cycle assessment, its uses, outputs and data requirements. In the case of waste characterisation, the meeting was programmed so that the subject was first addressed in a general session containing four very different papers. In a later, specialised session, the papers were related to compositional analysis of MSW and finally, a workshop was provided to enable consideration of more detailed aspects of composition and compositional analysis. 5. Poster sessions Posters were divided into six groups: waste management concepts; waste management technology; environmental aspects of landfilling; landfilling technology;risk analysis, environmental and technical assessment of landfilling; and monitoring. The poster sessions have always been considered as an integral part of the meeting and not just a place for second best papers. The posters were displayed in an area central to the symposium, providing an excellent viewing space (Figure 4). Additionally, each afternoon, over tea, there were opportunities to discuss with the authors the contents of their posters.
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Figure 4: Posters at Sardinia 2005 6. Football The football match between Italy and the Rest of the World is also integral to the symposium. Since the conversion of the football pitch into a go-carting track a few years back, the nature of the match has changed into a 5ish-a-side tournament. Each year I am amazed by the quality of some of the players – I am sure, with a little training, we would be able to provide an international team of some considerable merit. The on-field celebrations of the team winning by a penalty shoot-out this year, suggested that some players have watched too much sport on TV! 7. Awards
The award, A life for Waste, is given at each symposium to recognise individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to advances in international waste management. This year, John Pacey received the award at the Gala Dinner for his significant and fundamental contributions to the science and practice of waste management (Figure 5). John gained a degree in civil engineering at Washington and then an MSc in geotechnical engineering at MIT. He co-founded two geotechnical engineering companies, one of which was dedicated to the waste industry. He has published over 70 papers and served as an expert witness in numerous landfill design, performance and legal issues. His first book was on the generation and recovery of landfill gas and he has maintained his position in the forefront of emerging landfill technologies especially geotechnics, lining and landfill gas topics. Three other awards were presented at the Gala Dinner. ▪ The Kriton Curi Award was presented to B. F. A. Basnayake for the best conference paper from a developing country. This is awarded in memory of Prof Kriton Curi of Bogazici University, Istanbul, one of the main international experts in appropriate waste management technology in developing countries. ▪ The Giovanni Bozzini award commemorates Prof Bozzini of the University of Pavia, who was a leading Italian pioneer in the field of waste management research. It was given to Alessandra Polettini and Raffaella Pomi for the best Italian paper. ▪ The award for the best paper on biological waste treatment was given to Eckhard Kraft. This is given in memory of Prof Alberto Rozzi of the Technical University of Milan, considered to be one of the leading international researchers in the field of anaerobic digestion.
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Figure 5: Presentation of the award “A life for waste”. 8. International Waste Working Group (IWWG) Activities The aim of the IWWG is to provide a platform to encourage and support economical, ecological, integrated, and sustainable waste management and to promote scientific knowledge in this field. The IWWG is a registered non-profit organisation, managed by a board and assisted by an international scientific advisory committee. The objectives of IWWG are pursued mainly by means of: ▪ collecting, developing and disseminating innovative information on a world-wide basis on all aspects of waste management with particular emphasis on the results of research and development; ▪ providing and organizing education in waste management. Conferences: IWWG promotes and co-organises some of the most important international conferences on waste management, such as the Sardinia Symposia, the Asian Pacific Landfill Symposium (APLAS) and the Intercontinental Landfill Research Symposium (ICLRS). IWWG is also available to participate in waste management events organised by other bodies. This participation may include the planning of the scientific programme, the selection of conferences papers, or the organisation of training courses or specialised workshops, within the conference programme. The dates for upcoming conferences of interest are as follows.
▪ ICRS – Intercontinental Landfill Research Symposium , IWWG
Sweden, 14 – 16 June 2006
▪ WASTECON 2006 – Biennial Conference and Exhibition, IWMSA
Cape Town, South-Africa, 5 – 8 September 2006 Weimar, Germany, 13 – 15 September 2006 Yokohama, Japan, 18 – 22 September 2006 Shanghai, China, 18 – 20 October 2006.
▪ ORBIT 2006 – Biological Waste Management, ORBIT ▪ VIII International Conference on Geosynthetics, IGS ▪ APLAS – Asian Pacific Landfill Symposium, LSA
Seminars & Workshops: Seminars specifically addressing topics of interest are organised regularly by IWWG. Generally they last 1-2 days and involve international selected speakers. More specialised workshops are restricted to experts who bring with them results and experiences in order to promote discussion on particular subjects, that can be a basis for statements and position papers.
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Training Courses: These cover the wide core of the waste management field and are organized on request. The courses are tailored to the target audience. Lectures will be given by a selected group from the IWWG Scientific Advisory Committee. During Sardinia 2005, various groups of the IWWG took the opportunity to meet and to plan their work for the coming year. The Managing Board of IWWG met, as did its Scientific Advisory Committee and five of the IWWG task groups. Two of these groups organised workshops – the Landfill Aeration Task Group and the Sustainable Landfilling Task Group, which also convened a meeting on the Saturday following the conference. The Phoenix Task Group met on Monday to continue its work on incinerator residues. The Landfill Aeration Task Group met on Tuesday prior to the workshop on the same topic. The Tetrawama (Asia Link) Group held two meetings and the CLEAR Task group on methane oxidation, spend Friday morning reviewing its progress. There was also an editorial meeting of the Waste Management Journal which considered, among other things, the status of the journal and its improving impact factor. 9. Conclusions Sardinia 2005 contributed to the long run of successful waste management symposia that have been organised in this series. In 2007 we look forward to celebrating 20 years of Sardinia Symposia; the meeting will run from 1st – 5th October 2007. Like Sardinia 2005, we hope it will contribute to the development and the dissemination of waste management strategies in both the developed and the developing world. For those of us from Europe, these meetings provide a much needed space in which to step back from European legislation and take note of the reaction of experienced nonEuropean delegates, who obviously consider some of the strategies and directions that we are following to be pretty questionable.
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