8 August, 2013 | Awards
The International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) presents an annual award to the best publication worldwide in the field of solid waste management. The 2013 ISWA Publication Award was announced today and was won by Dr Costas Velis, Professor David C. Wilson et al. for their paper: An analytical framework and tool (‘InteRa’) for integrating the informal recycling sector in waste and resource management systems in developing countries. The online citation stated that: ‘The (judging) panel believes that this paper addresses an important area of waste management in developing countries, i.e. the informal recycling sector; and that it offers a practical framework for designing successful initiatives to integrate the informal sector into formal waste management systems.’ The award will be presented at the ISWA 2013 World Congress in Vienna in October.
More background to this work and information of the framework proposed is available; while the paper itself is open-access. Professor David C Wilson is the Scientific Co-ordinator of the ISWA Task Force on Waste and Globalisation and Dr Costas Velis of the University of Leeds is a member; together they led the Task Force’s work stream on the informal recycling sector. The other co-authors of the winning paper are Ondina Rocca, Prof Stephen R Smith, and Prof Chris R Cheeseman of Imperial College and Antonis Mavropoulos of D-Waste Hellas.
This is the third time that DCW has won the prestigious ISWA Publication Award. He won the 2010 award for the UN-Habitat publication Solid Waste Management in the World’s Cities; and the 2003 award for the2003 award for the ISWA-UNEP-Basel Convention Training Resource Pack for Hazardous Waste Management in Developing Economies.
8 May, 2013 | Awards
The QS World University Rankings are widely regarded as the preeminent guide to the relative quality of universities from around the globe. The 2013 subject rankings have been published this week, showing Imperial College’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department as no 1. in the world, ahead of 2. Berkeley, 3. Tokyo, 4. Delft and 5. MIT.
David C Wilson has been a Visiting Professor in the Department since 2000, and is active in teaching and research on solid and hazardous waste management in both developed and developing countries, within the Water and Environmental Engineering section of the Department.
Civil and Environmental Engineering is the only Imperial Department to be ranked first in the QS World University Rankings and the only UK university to be ranked in the top 20 for Civil Engineering – Cambridge are 22nd, Oxford 28th and UCL 48th.
8 May, 2013 | Awards, Publication
David C Wilson, Ljiljana Rodic and Costas Velis have published a major overview paper in this month’s Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Waste and Resource Management, on Integrated Sustainable Waste Management in Developing Countries: Concept, Realities and Challenges. The data presented show that the waste management performance of developing country cities has improved significantly over the last 10 years. Levels of collection coverage and controlled disposal of 95% in middle-income, and 50% in low-income, countries are already commonplace. Recycling rates of 20-30% are achieved by the informal sector in many lower income countries, at no direct cost to the city – presenting a major opportunity for all key stakeholders, if the persistent challenges can be resolved.
UPDATE 05 June 2014. This paper has won an ICE Publishing Award, and is now free to download.
This paper uses the lens of ‘Integrated sustainable waste management’ (ISWM) to examine how cities in developing countries have been tackling their solid waste problems. The history of related concepts and terms is reviewed, and ISWM is clearly differentiated from integrated waste management (IWM), used mostly in the context of technological integration in developed countries. Instead, ISWM examines both the physical components – collection, disposal, recycling – and the governance aspects – inclusivity of users and service providers; financial sustainability; and coherent, sound institutions underpinned by proactive policies.
The evidence suggests that efficient, effective and affordable systems are tailored to local needs and conditions, developed with direct involvement of service beneficiaries. Despite the remaining challenges, evidence of recent improvements suggests that sustainable solid waste and resources management is feasible for developing countries.
The paper builds on substantial recent research by DCW and his colleagues. Other papers compare the performance of a sample of 20 cities around the world; and provide a framework for designing city-specific initiatives for the inclusion of the informal recycling sector within a municipal solid waste management system. Professor David C Wilson is at Imperial College London; Dr Ljiljana Rodic at Wageningen University and Research Centre, the Netherlands; and Dr Costas Velis at the University of Leeds, UK.
8 April, 2013 | Waste Management
| The Welsh Government has launched a public consultation on its national Waste Prevention Programme. The programme focuses on the actions that householders and businesses can take to reduce waste, while at the same time saving money; and also on the possible interventions that Government can take to facilitate the process. Professor David C Wilson was invited to chair the stakeholder Steering Group convened to review the evidence base and advise on finalisation of the consultation document prior to its publication.
All EU Member States are required under the revised Waste Framework Directive to prepare a national Waste Prevention Programme. The deadline for publication is December 2013, and Wales is one of the first countries to consult on its proposed programme. A series of industry workshops will be held during May to help elaborate the proposals, and the consultation closes on 20 June 2013.
The Waste Prevention Programme will ensure that householders and businesses in Wales are able to reduce: the quantity of waste, including through the re-use of products or the extension of the life span of products; the adverse impacts of the generated waste on the environment and human health; and the content of harmful substances in materials and products.
Professor Wilson has worked extensively on waste prevention over the last ten years, and has published a number of peer-reviewed papers on the international evidence base for both household and business waste prevention. |
8 November, 2012 | Publication
One of Professor David C Wilson’s long-standing research interests at Imperial College is the contribution made to solid waste management (SWM) in developing country cities by the often large informal recycling sector (IRS). This autumn has seen a flurry of activity. The leading French newspaper Le Monde ran a feature article by Gilles van Kotte on the importance of the IRS on 01 September 2012, including an interview with DCW. A major paper presented at the ISWA Annual Congress in September sets out a framework for professionalisation and integration of the IRS into SWM systems. DCW made a presentation to an Agence Française de Développement (AFD) conference in October, on the role of the role of public-private partnerships in SWM in developing countries, including that of the IRS. And DCW chaired an invited workshop in November to discuss partnerships between global producers of consumer goods and the IRS, to achieve product stewardship goals in developing countries.
Many developing country cities aspire to modern waste management systems, which are associated with relatively high recycling rates of clean, source separated materials. Most already have informal sector recycling systems, which are driven solely by the revenues derived from selling recovered materials, even though they are saving the formal sector money by reducing waste quantities. There is clear potential for ‘win-win’ solutions, which increase recycling rates, protect people’s livelihoods, improve working conditions and reduce child labour, bring the recyclers within the formal economy, and reduce further the overall costs of waste management for the formal sector.
DCW is currently leading work on the IRS for the International Solid Waste Association (ISWA)’s Task Force on Waste and Globalisation, which is aiming both to make the case for, and also to provide guidance on how to achieve, such professionalisation and integration. The ISWA Congress paper, presented on 18 September and published in an open-access special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Waste Management & Research, sets out an analytical framework for selecting a set of interventions which is appropriate in a particular local situation. Possible interventions are grouped into four categories: one of these focuses on organisation and capacity building of the IRS; while the other three are the interfaces between the IRS and the formal SWM system, the materials and value chain, and society as a whole. The recommendation is that IRS professionalisation and integration initiatives should consider all four categories in a balanced way, and pay increased attention to their interdependencies which are central to success, including specific actions such as the IRS having access to source separated waste and to microfinance.
DCW was invited to present at the AFD conference in Paris on 25 October by PROPARCO, which promotes private sector investment in development. A special issue of their journal Private Sector & Development, on Waste: the challenges facing developing countries,was launched at the conference.
The Product Stewardship – Informal Sector Forum in Berlin on 14-15 November was hosted by the German Technical Co-operation AgencyGIZ, and organised for them by the consultancies RWA and Waste.
Extended producer responsibility (EPR) was developed in Europe as a policy tool, aiming to transfer the responsibility and costs of managing post-consumer product waste back from the local authorities to the ‘producer’ or supply-chain which provided the original product. The aim of this informal forum was to exchange and develop practical, workable ideas for sustainable, inclusive product stewardship in middle-income countries, where the existing recyclers are largely in the informal sector.
