Abstract
For over 37 years, Waste Management & Research (WM&R) has worked to promote innovation, bridging a gap between academic researchers and waste management practitioners. WM&R has been a knowledge platform for both academics and industry professionals alike, with many subscribers employed by and/or involved in universities, government agencies, private industries, engineering, management, urban planning, and public health.
Particularly over the last 5 years, we have seen a shift in the way waste management is assessed from outside our own sector, in the face of several transitions happening in the world. WM&R has published several editorials as well as original publications from leading authors that have discussed important emerging topics in the waste management sector.
The Circular Economy and the Bioeconomy are two of these processes that set the waste management sector in a central position, as a key actor to achieve the envisaged goals of these two transition processes, by closing the loops between production and waste among industrial sectors, with the aim of minimising the generation of waste rather than simply recycling what materials are left over after beneficial use by industry and consumers. In this sense, WM&R has provided state-of-the-art discussions for the implications of the circular economy (Bartl, 2018; Ghosh and Agamuthu, 2018; Velis, 2018), the bioeconomy (Bezama, 2016; Navia and Mohanty, 2012; Thrän and Bezama, 2017), and the intersection between both of these strategies (Bezama, 2016, 2018; Hildebrandt and Bezama, 2018; Navia and Chamy, 2017; Oliveira and Navia, 2017).
Moreover, a series of global issues are now top concerns in the waste management sector. Subjects such as Marine Litter and Microplastic Pollution have been addressed in several editorials of our journal (Agamuthu, 2018; Fauziah et al., 2015; Hamid et al., 2018; Velis, 2014; Wang et al., 2018), just like the ‘4th Industrial Revolution and its relevance to waste management’ (Agamuthu, 2017). Moreover, given the significant disruption in traditional recycling efforts caused by China’s ‘National Sword’, this subject has also been identified as a top concern for our sector (Ross, 2017). In addition, Waste management challenges in developing countries have been regularly addressed (Bukhari et al., 2018; Chen et al., 2018; Farahbakhsh and Forghani, 2018; Noya et al., 2018), as well as Design for Sustainability and its impact in the circular economy (Hildebrandt et al., 2017; Ishtiaq et al., 2018; Popa et al., 2018). There are still no perfect or broadly applicable answers to these and other subjects and topics, and discussions towards developing suitable answers are still at their early stages.
In January 2018, we announced the call for articles for this, our first Open Access issue. Considering the above, our invitation was extended to include contributions on the topics identified above. Additionally, we mentioned our interest in contributions dealing with the topics Waste management approaches in the new ‘Smart Cities’, as well as Sustainability Innovations & Research and Development, but also open to new possible subjects of interest. This call was a major success, and despite of the tight deadlines and schedules, we received over 30 manuscripts, and our task was to select seven manuscripts that would cover a broad spectrum of topics while also providing interesting discussions in our field.
From the selected manuscripts, Kabera et al. (2019) carried out a benchmark performance of combined solid waste management and recycling systems in major cities of East Africa. The authors identified the major strengths of the individual waste management concepts, as well as the common bottlenecks that prevent a more efficient implementation of the designed management concepts.
Moreover, Tirkolaee et al. (2019) address in their contribution the importance of optimising the design of urban waste management concepts, focusing in this case on the routing design within the city, by using state-of-the-art solver algorithms. The authors did not only perform a theoretical analysis in a case study city, but also crystalised some relevant recommendations that could be used by policy makers and practitioners to enhance the collection design. In the same working field, Maalouf and El-Fadel (2019) apply a life cycle assessment-based approach for evaluating the potential impacts of integrations within the waste management system, in order to define the most appropriate management practices for a case study system. The authors concluded that the use of such approaches can support the development of viable integrated waste management plans, as well as providing important information to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of the evaluated systems that can help in decision-making and policy-planning.
Vinck et al. (2019), on the other hand, address a current issue in the waste management sector, which is the lack of participation in source separation programmes for municipal solid waste. The authors address particularly the case of restaurants, and aims to identify design opportunities that could help integrate and optimise the collection and recycling of food waste in those establishments. Also within the city systems, Adzawla et al. (2019) surveyed more than 16,500 households in Ghana to assess the relevance of socioeconomic factors on the final decisions of households to adopt a particular solid waste disposal system, defining a series of recommendations for policy makers to enhance the waste management systems’ performance in African cities.
Limburg et al. (2019) addresses a more technical topic, which is the identification of future problems related to the management of new materials currently under development, as there are no standard applications for their proper management. The authors address in particular the case of carbon fibre reinforced polymers, particularly in their design considering a thermal treatment as the most promising management systems for them after the end of their life cycle. Finally, Logan and Visvanathan (2019) present a critical review on the current management practices for the digestate originated from the anaerobic treatment of the organic fractions of municipal solid waste. They propose to change the management of the anaerobic processes from the sole focus on biogas to an integrated biogas and digestate quality optimisation, to ensure an appropriate maximisation of the overall value derived from the managed residual streams.
We hope that this selection of manuscripts for this, WM&R’s first Open Access issue, will provide our readers with a compelling overview of the state-of-the-art approaches in addressing today’s big issues in waste management. Of course, this is only a beginning, and we seek more articles from the scientific community and from practitioners who want to contribute to the present knowledge base. For this, we are pleased to continue offering WM&R as a leading platform for presentation of research and analyses that address critical and emerging waste management issues and solutions.
