Professor David C Wilson and his co-authors Costas Velis of the University of Leeds and Ljiljana Rodic of Wageningen University have won a prestigious award from the Institution of Civil Engineers. DCW is particularly pleased that an overview paper on Integrated sustainable waste management in developing countries has been awarded, not as the best paper in the particular journal Waste and Resource Management, but as one of the four best papers published in 2013 across all 27 peer-reviewed ICE journals. Like all the winning papers, our paper is now free to download from the ICE website.
Solid waste management is often viewed as the ‘poor relation’ even among environmental topic areas, and then most attention is paid to ‘high-tech’ waste management in the West. So for an overview paper on sustainable waste management in developing countries to win this award from one of the World’s leading engineering institutions, in competition with papers on ‘hard’, mainstream engineering topics such as structures and bridges, is not just an honour for the authors but also an important recognition for the waste and resources sector and for work on appropriate solutions for developing countries.
Each year, the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) acknowledges the best work published in their 27 prestigious peer-reviewed journals at the ICE Publishing Awards ceremony, held in October at the historic Institution headquarters in Westminster, opposite the Houses of Parliament. ICE state that ‘We award authors from both industry and academia who have produced work judged by their peers to be of exceptional quality and benefit to the civil engineering and science community’. DCW’s paper in Waste and Resource Management has won the Telford Premium Award for the fourth best paper published across all ICE journals.
Perhaps the most important aspect of winning an award is that each winning paper is free to view on the ICE Virtual Library as part of ICE’s commitment to furthering knowledge and best practice in civil engineering. Access to ICE journals is normally by subscription only, so access to the papers is restricted – which is a particular drawback for a paper on waste management in developing countries, where even universities generally cannot afford journal subscriptions. So we are very excited that access to our paper is now ‘open access’.