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Sardinia 2003: The Sustainable Wastes Management Conference

Howard Robinson, Technical Director of Enviros Consulting, reviews October’s Sardinia International Wastes Management and Landfill Symposium.

When the next biennial Sardinia Symposium meets in October 2005, this beautiful location will have hosted what is now undoubtedly one of the world’s leading international waste management conferences for

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10 years. Although attendance in October 2001¹ was affected by events in New York only four weeks earlier, and for the first time ever delegate numbers did not increase, this year’s event put things back on track.

There were 886 delegates from 57 countries, with 384 oral papers and 77 poster papers forming the technical programme for the week. Six simultaneous sessions, form 9:00am to 7:40pm each day, can terrify first time delegates. Somewhat less scary than the usual 8kg of hardback proceedings documents, however, was the 650-page hardback volume of paper abstracts² with a CD-ROM containing the full papers in a simple searchable format.

It is always instructive to look at the proportion of the programme taken up by papers in specific areas of wastes management. Traditional topics such as landfill, leachate, and gas, lining and capping, incinerator residues, refuse-derived fuels (RDF) and waste management in developing countries remained dominant, with fields such as waste pre-treatment, lifecycle analysis, recycling, and health effects of all waste management technologies increasing rapidly. Remarkably, in the light of major changes facing EU countries, only two papers in the whole conference addressed the management of hazardous waste.

This does not reflect the symposium organiser’s agenda, but rather the distribution of abstracts received amounting in total 640, from which the 461 full, written papers had been selected by an international panel.

As is traditional, the symposium was opened by a guest lecture on a broader topic than wastes management. Gunter Sager is manager of Volkswagons’s environment department, and spoke of “the car of the future – a contribution to sustainability”.

Although wastes management is universally unpopular, and the general public support measures to raise standards (if not attempts to make them pay for this), personal freedom to emit greenhouse gases by driving a car is far more of a political minefield. Volkswagon, no doubt in common with most motor manufacturers seeks to develop more fuel-efficient vehicles, and less polluting fuels, but sadly one could not help but compare the outcome to a cross between Sir Donald Campbell’s Bluebird and the Sinclair C5.

Developing countries continue to be remarkably well represented at the Symposium, assisted by grants and subsidies from the organisers. Delegates and presentations from Ghana, Ecuador, China, Columbia, the Philippines, Swaziland and Guyana, as well as more than 30 from South Africa, did a good job in keeping feet firmly on the ground when esoteric aspects of sustainability, or expensive technologies, were being discussed.

The UK was well represented with 62 registered delegates – second only to Italy in number, including all sectors of the waste industry – operation, regulations, policy makers, consultants, and academics. More than 50 UK papers, plus several posters, were presented on topics as diverse as leachates from foot and mouth disease (FMD) burial sites, mechanical biological treatment (MBT), landfill settlement, risk assessment and modelling. Ann Stringfellow of the University of Southampton collected an award for her colleagues for the best paper on anaerobic digestion, entitled “Survival of Salmonella in the Anaerobic Digestion of Kitchen Waste”.

Professor Bob Ham, who recently retired from the University of Wisconsin after nearly 40 years spent researching and teaching the science and practice of waste management, was an extremely popular award winner. He received the biennial Sardinia “A Life for Waste” award, in recognition of his contributions to waste management internationally.

An interesting development was the launch of a spin off organisation from the Sardinia Symposium, to be known as the International Waste Working Group (IWWG). This group comprises several key organisers of the conference, and it was established in 2002, with the specific aim of providing an international intellectual platform to promote scientific advances in the waste management field.

Sardinia provides by far the best opportunity for waste managers across the world to meet each other and discuss common problems – many enduring friendships and co-operations are begun in workshops, or even over a pizza.

IWWG will be a non-profit organisation that seeks to extend the philosophy of Sardinia. This will be done by organising further international conferences (eg the Asia-Pacific Landfill Symposium during 2004), by publishing textbooks, and perhaps most interestingly by providing lively, web-based discussion groups on specialised waste management topics.

As ever the greatest number of papers dealt with the control of landfill emissions – gas, leachate and odours. MBT was covered by many technical papers, and a vital need is for increased understanding of the fate of nitrogen during the composting process. Although in the past the presence of nitrogen compounds in composts being applied to agriculture was actually a benefit, now that BSE and FMD result in more MBT wastes entering landfills, potential for long term release of ammoniacal-N is obviously of increased concern.

The issue of final storage quality for wastes being landfilled, and criteria for this, was common topic of discussion. Countries now recognise that even pre-treated wastes presently do not approach final storage quality (FSQ), and when landfilled still require continuing aftercare, probably for centuries.

A lot of research work is also being undertaken on aerobic landfills, and although potential benefits are attractive – especially in completion of old existing landfills – the practicalities are yet to be demonstrated over time at full scale. Relatively few papers looked at groundwater impacts from landfills, presumably as landfill lining systems become more widespread internationally.

The closing round table discussion session “Is the EU Directive the Right Tool for Landfill Sustainability?”, caused the usual levels of debate, form both EU and non-EU countries. It is widely acknowledged that we continue to landfill in a non-sustainable manner, but that the concept of sustainability does not feature greatly within the Directive. Dr Jan Gronow, representing the UK on the panel, made what could become a fundamental point when she referred to discussions that had taken place at the TAC Landfill Group. A significant number of member states wanted the Waste Acceptance Criteria, which apply for hazardous wastes going to non-hazardous sites, also to apply to all non-hazardous wastes going to such sites. Such limits on the landfill of all wastes (e.g. total organic carbon (TOC) values <5 per cent) would act to prevent the landfilling of mechanically biologically pre-treated (MBT or MBP) wastes – a major future problem for many UK and other waste operators, presently in the throes of spending millions of pounds on such facilities.

Jan Gronow’s view was that such legislation is likely to be on the agenda as early as 2014, when member states meet to review the final targets to be adopted in 2016, and there may well be a majority of countries who will support this – completely messing up many national strategies as countries attempt to comply with the present requirements.

Delegates from outside remain astonished by what Europe is doing and almost unanimously take our progress as dire warning of what not to do in their own countries.

Sardinia is a unique event, not least as a result of the amazing island setting, The facilities, and reliable warm Mediterranean weather, enable delegates to discuss wastes with an intensity and passion that I have never encountered elsewhere.

References:

1. Sardinia 2001: Waste Management on Spaceship Earth, Wastes Management, November 201, pp 42-43
2. Proceedings of Sardinia 2003, the Ninth International Waste Management and Landfill Symposium, pp 6-10, October 2003, available from eurowaste@tin.it or via the website www.sardiniasymposium.it.

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