RISKCYCLE

Participant details

Technische Universität Dresden (TUD) Institut für Abfallwirtschaft und Altlasten

The Dresden University of Technology was founded in 1828 and is among Germany's oldest universities of technology. It is the largest university in the State of Saxony, with more than 30 000 students and 4 500 employees, including about 480 p rofessors. The 14 faculties cover a wide range of fields in science and engineering, humanities, social sciences and medicine. In addition to the wide range of courses available to students, the university offers 16 programs for international study.

The Institute for Waste Management and Contaminated Sites Treatment at the Dresden University of Technology was founded by the cooperation of the chair for waste management and the chair of contaminated site treatment in December 1995. The institute is provided with modern laboratories, lecture rooms, and has large spatial capacities for research reactors at its disposal. The combination of research topics in waste management, in contaminated site treatment and systems analysis in a single institute facilitates the approach to a wide area of related problems in environmental science. The principle focus of the Chair of Waste Management is on the engineering, ecological and economical aspects of waste management, and the assessment of waste flows and ways to influence them. Research subjects of particular relevance for the topic of this coordination action are:

• Fate and behavior of substances in different waste streams
• Endocrine disruptors in sludge and soils
• Hazard reduction in electric and electronic waste management
• Risk assessment and long-term behavior of landfills
• Biological and thermal treatment of waste

The institute has participated in several EC-funded projects and hereby taken over co-ordination responsibility in a number of cases. Partnering with institutions and stakeholders from around the globe and from different disciplines to tackle complex scientific problems, share experiences and to establish larger research co-operations has become a common and successful mechanism of the institute. Recent examples of the institute’s engagement in EU-funded international research cooperations are safe recycling and disposal of hazardous waste in Vietnam and India (SACODI) the European network for specification of chain management tools for environmental analysis of metabolised use, takeback and recycling (CHAINET), the European Urban Waste Management Cluster (EUWMC), the Concerted Action on Environmental Technologies (ETCA) and the shared RTD-project on variable rate pricing in urban waste management (PAYT).

Lead: Prof. Dr. Bernd Bilitewski