Circular Economy & Field Experiences

In a recent Brussels workshop organized by the ISWA’s Hazardous Waste Working Group, on January 28th, Antonis contributed with a presentation regarding the field experiences from plastic recyclables and reuse practices. Based on real experiences and on the recent ISWA’s work on Resource Management (http://www.iswa.org/iswa/iswa-groups/task-forces) he highlighted the need for a fully functional traceability of the hazardous waste pollutants and the opportunity to achieve this with the emergence of the Internet of Things. He demonstrated the need to deal with the complexity and the diversity of the plastic materials and he explained that we need to rethink and redefine the recycling targets beyond the w/w percentages, taking into account the urban metabolism advances. He closed his lecture mentioning that we have to walk a long way until circular economy becomes a real project rather than a political concept and highlighted the lack of proper scientific indicators for a systemic and scientific description of the Circular Economy. All the materials of the workshop are available at ISWA’s Knowledge Base (http://www.iswa.org/media/publications/knowledge-base/) .