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The International Conference on Waste Management and the Environment is organised every two years by the Wessex Institute. This ninth conference follows the success of previous meetings held in Cadiz (2002); Rhodes (2004); Malta (2006); Granada (2008); Tallinn (2010); the New Forest, home of the Wessex Institute (2012); Ancona (2014); Valencia (2016) and Seville (2018).

The conference provides a forum for the exchange of scientific information and works on the current situation of waste management amongst professionals, researchers, government departments and local authorities.

Waste Management is one of the key problems of modern society due to the ever-expanding volume and complexity of discarded domestic and industrial waste.

Society is increasingly aware of the need to establish better practices and safer solutions for waste disposal. This requires further investigation into disposal methods and recycling as well as new technologies to monitor landfills, industrial mining wastes and chemical and nuclear repositories.

This creates a need for more research on current disposal methods such as landfills, incineration, chemical and effluent treatment, as well as recycling, clean technologies, waste monitoring, public and corporate awareness and general education.

Unfortunately, many of the policies adopted in the past were aimed at short term solutions without due regard to the long term implications on health and the environment, leading in many cases to the need to take difficult and expensive remedial action.

The desired direction of Waste Management is towards sustainable strategies. The approach which has emerged as the most promising has been called 4Rs, where reduction, reuse, recycling and recovery are seen as the best actions. This largely decreases the volume of waste that needs final disposal. Recovery refers to the establishment of two new classifications, those of Secondary Raw Materials (SRM) and of Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF). They both relate to useful products obtained from waste and make a shift from the mere recycle or reuse – mostly seen as a way to reduce dumping – to the valuable employment of such matter within the production cycle.

More recently these concepts have given rise to the new model of the ‘Circular Economy’, which is based on the reuse of what up to now has been considered waste, reintroducing them into the production cycle. The objective of the circular economy is to reduce consumption and achieve savings in the use of raw materials, water and energy, throughout all processing phases and during production, which ought to be as efficient as possible.

Another aspect of this revolution is happening subtly and gradually by people buying waste; particularly eWaste and some types of plastic, the so-called technical waste. This is happening due to the strong demand and high price of certain new materials and the possibility of sorting out waste in developing regions of the world. As a result, a market in Secondary Raw Materials (SRM) has developed.

A major cause of concern is the implications of waste management on health and the environment. The conference discusses some of these topics and the need to arrive at suitable strategies to waste management.

Further steps are required towards the improvement of current technologies, increased collaboration between the public, government and private sectors and increased involvement of all stakeholders.