Wednesday, 27 June 2012 07:54

PRESS RELEASE

INTERNATIONAL INTENSIVE COURSE

”Sustainable Waste Management”

The 1st International Intensive Course entitled “Sustainable Waste Management: a Workshop on Principles and Practice”, was successfully completed with great participation on Friday, June 22^nd 2012 at the Athens Information Technology (AIT). The program was addressed to engineers and other professionals in the environmental sector. The 5-day intensive seminar was co-organized by the Earth Engineering Center of Columbia University, WTERT Greece and AIT, and was hosted in AIT (Markopoulou Avenue, Peania), from June 18^th – 22^nd 2012.
The workshop was organized for the first time in Greece, aiming at the examination of state-of-the-art technologies for the sustainable management of solid- and other waste, as well as its significance in the production of renewable energy. The workshop focused on new practices in evaluating the environmental benefits and impacts, as well as the economic viability of all sustainable waste management technologies including:

• Waste-to-Energy
• Recycling
• Mechanical-Biological Treatment
• Composting
• Sanitary landfilling

The program was followed by a total of sixty seven participants with various backgrounds, such as engineers, professionals and executives in the environmental sector, researchers and postgraduate students from Greece, Belgium, Serbia, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, Lebanon and Jordan. Among other participants, engineers from the companies TITAN, Lafarge, the Public Power Corporation (PPC), J&P Avax, METKA, TAMIZ SAHAR (Azerbaijan), ΚΕΟ (UAE), KEPPEL SEGHERS (Belgium), the Municipalities of Markopoulo, Piraeus, as well as consulting companies such as EPTA and ENVIROPLAN etc., were listed. Also, several postgraduate students attended the workshop, from the Universities of Athens, Patras, Novi Sad Serbia, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium etc.
The program was under the auspices of PPC, the Technical Chamber of Greece, the National Association of Chemical Engineers and was supported by the Institute of Civil Engineers (ICE) and the Hellenic-American Chamber. The communication sponsors were Water & Waste magazine, Epixeiro.gr and Plant Management & Energy In. The seminar managed to achieve one of its main goals, which was to bring together professionals from the sector of sustainable waste management in order to exchange views and deepen their knowledge regarding modern waste management technologies, through a thorough, 28-hour overview of global sustainable waste management practices and their contribution in the production of energy from Renewable Energy Sources. The international speakers of the seminar were Nickolas Themelis, Stefano Consonni, Carlo Vandecasteele, Goran Vujic, Costas Velis, Efstratios Kalogirou, Abraham Karagiannidis and Epaminondas Voutsas.

The seminar was concluded with a field trip to Nafpaktos, where apart from a site visit at the local landfill, which was attended by the mayor of Nafpaktos, a theatrical performance was also organized in the Ancient Theatre of Makyneia (“Trojan Women” by Euripides), by the theatrical workshop of Mrs. Irene Evangelatou.