Dear Friends, Colleagues and ISWA Members

As you will read from the newsletter we are entering the most intense part of the year, the spring conference and trade show season. This annual merry-go-round sees us all involved in ISWA's activities in many parts of the world. I will be in Washington DC followed by Kuala Lumpur in March and then onwards into the months of April and May hardly a week goes by without an ISWA meeting.

The intense three days schedule in DC is interesting because it aims to promote the ISWA 2017 World Congress which will be held there; and KL's Beacon conference also promotes their World Congress event in September 2018.

Both meetings come at particularly interesting times of transformation of our industry. As my ISWA blog has reported several times recently, the downturn in energy and commodity prices is having a devastating effect on recycling in the USA, where the CEO of Waste Inc talks openly about the need to send to landfill waste they would have been previously recycled. Recycling stations are closing nationwide too.

In Malaysia the optimistic and ambitious expansion programmes the Government laid down for all sectors of the economy, including waste management, have hit a budget dead-end as the export value of its petroleum has collapsed.

All this puts pressure on the waste industry to cut costs. This is ironic as the need for environmental protection from poorly treated or untreated waste requires greater investments, not less. An Australian report shows how contaminated their coastal waters are with plastic waste, whilst the Ellen Macarthur Foundation rather surprisingly declared that by 2050 the oceans will hold more plastics than fish. How one can measure this is beyond my understanding, but the signal is: the waste emergency is worsening rapidly and we need massive investments in land-based collection and treatment systems to turn it round.

A hard message in these hard times of budget restrictions, but we must fight to continue to raise the importance of waste management so we receive our fair part of government funding. I will be doing this in all our meetings over the coming weeks. I hope to meet you in one of them.

David Newman
President, ISWA

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