While the UK froze in early December 2010, Serbia basked in temperatures in the teens. So no need for the overcoat I travelled out with. I was in Novi Sad, an hour’s drive northwest from Belgrade, to participate in an ISWA Beacon Conference jointly sponsored by the Serbian Solid Waste Association.
This was my first ISWA commitment after taking over the presidency from Atilio Savino at ISWA’s annual congress in Hamburg and also my first visit to Serbia, although this was the third Beacon Conference to be held in Novi Sad. The conference covered public private partnerships (PPP) and hazardous waste in developing countries in South East Europe, the Middle East and the Mediterranean – the area covered by the ISWA Regional Development Network.
With its population of over 300,000, Novi Sad is the capital of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, in the north of Serbia with a total population of two million. At the conference we were welcomed by Dusanka Sremacki, the provincial minister for the Provincial Secretariat for Architecture, City Planning and Civil Engineering, who had just flown in from Bucharest, where she had been discussing collaboration on environmental issues between Serbia, Hungary and Romania. Serbia is now fast-tracked for potential EU membership, hence its interest in linking with two existing EU Member States and in both PPP and hazardous waste management.
The conference opened with a presentation about ISWA focusing on the ISWA Climate Change and Waste Management White Paper, which had been produced for the COP15 in Copenhagen in December 2009. The paper was subsequently translated into Spanish for the COP16 in Cancun, Mexico, which ran concurrently with the Beacon Conference.
I responded that to date waste prevention has had limited effect, and that over the past two years it was difficult to disentangle the effects of the global financial crisis from the underlying efforts made by business to do more with less.
Landfill would remain an option of last resort even in those countries that were working towards zero waste to landfill. Certainly in the U.S. and also in Australia and New Zealand, the market and public opinion against incineration ruled out that option at present, but perhaps fuel security and the need for renewable energy sources would break the logjam.
By contrast, overcapacity in incineration in several European countries, especially Germany and the Netherlands, offers other European countries a cheaper option for disposing of their waste. Italy is therefore sending its non-recyclable plastic waste for energy recovery in German WtE plants rather than more expensive Italian WtE facilities.
My thanks to all those members of ISWA from the region and beyond who made this ISWA Beacon Conference such a success, and who made me so welcome to Novi Sad.
Jeff Cooper
President, ISWA
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