Issue 35 June 2015
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NEWS FROM THE PRESIDENT
Dear Friends, Colleagues and ISWA Members
An intense period of activity in our waste world always comes just before the northern summer holidays, as if our colleagues are burning their last energies before running for a beach or mountain to recover!
Korea, Greece, London, Brussels have been my destinations of the last weeks and Singapore is approaching in July, my last pre-holiday journey for ISWA. And ISWA too has many events underway including study tours and conferences around the world.
I'm pleased to announce our new cooperation with Texas University at Arlington on landfill training for developing countries, see the relevant article in this newsletter, which goes hand in hand with the activities at our other training centre, Singapore. Hopefully these experiences will help form a new generation of waste managers capable of taking our industry forward into the next decade.
Our Task Force on Resource Management spent two intense and well organised days in Paris in June discussing our report on waste and resources, due to be published for the Annual Conference in September, and thanks to Veolia for hosting the event.
And I just finished helping to edit Antonis Mavropoulos's study on the health impacts of open dumps, quite a dramatic report showing how tens of millions of people worldwide are suffering severe health problems from uncontrolled waste dumping and burning.
These will go hand in hand with the ground breaking report ISWA and UNEP publish in September called the Global Waste Management Outlook, and I know you already are aware of its importance in terms of defining our industry over the next years.
All this is good news. But the paradox of this time of relative economic growth and prosperity comes from the very hard times many recyclers are going through as prices fall; we know how paper and plastics are suffering, but gate fees for organics also are falling; in part ( in the UK for example) because very high renewable energy subsidies are creating greater competition for organic feedstocks, in part because more organics treatment facilities are opened and operating ( northern and central Europe) driving down the prices.
This volatility is destabilising the industry at a time when, in the EU and USA at least, waste production is levelling off or indeed has been falling steadily. The logical consequence of this, in any industry, would be consolidation. That is difficult in a sector often owned by public bodies. We shall see how it plays out - certainly in the USA blood is being shed (not literally of course !)
Join us in Antwerp on September 7th and be part of this debate.
Best wishes
David Newman
President, ISWA