Introduction

The International Conference on Waste Management and the Environment is organised every two years by the Wessex Institute of Technology in collaboration with other institutions. This fifth conference follows the success of previous meetings held in Cádiz (2002), Rhodes (2004), Malta (2006) and Granada (2008).

Waste Management is becoming one of the key problems of the modern world, an international issue that is intensified by the volume and complexity of domestic and industrial waste discarded by society. Unfortunately, many of the practices adopted in the past were aimed at short-term solutions without sufficient regard or knowledge for long term implications on health, the environment or sustainability and this, in many cases, is leading to the need to take difficult and expensive remedial action.