keynote speaker

Prof. Ken Kawamoto
Department of Environmental Science and Infrastructure Engineering,
Graduate School of Science and Engineering,
Saitama University, Japan

THE EMERGING ROLE OF GEOENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING: APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGIES FOR ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION CONTROL AND INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT

Open dumping of waste is the most common way of disposing municipal solid waste in developing countries due to the lower cost over the other waste management techniques. In the case of Sri Lanka, most of waste landfills are operated as unmanaged and uncontrolled open dumpsites as a result of lack of engineered technologies and capacities of operation and maintenance. Due to rapid urbanization and increase in population, amount of solid waste generation is expected to increase rapidly in upcoming years and environmentally sound waste landfilling is highly required in Sri Lanka. Open dumping of solid waste under unsanitary conditions causes various kinds of problems: 1) Damage to human health surrounding the dumping sites (water-born infectious diseases), 2) Environmental pollution (water, air, soil, and sea), 3) Disaster (landslide, explosion), 4) Global warming (emission of greenhouse gases), and so on. In order to avoid and prevent those problems, appropriate techniques for pollution control and environmental restoration should be adopted. On the other hand, with rapid urbanization on all fronts, much construction is conducted everywhere in developing countries, especially in big cities. All these activities, new construction, renovation, and demolition of buildings and structures, generate huge amounts of waste, called construction and demolition waste (CDW). In Vietnam, for example, the total municipal solid waste generation was about 60 thousand tons/day on average, of which the CDW waste accounts for 10–12% of total solid waste according to the State of the Environment report of 2011 on solid waste management issued by Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment. In order to maximize the potential positive impacts but at the same time to minimize the negative effects of modernization and industrialization, it is necessary 1) to take immediate measures to protect the environment, 2) to promote recycling of CDW, and 3) to reduce the use of natural resources for environmentally-sustainable infrastructure development. Based on the agreement between Sri Lanka and Japan, the JST-JICA SATREPS (Science and Technology Research Partnership for Sustainable Development) project entitled “Development of pollution control and environmental restoration technologies of waste landfill sites taking into account geographical characteristics in Sri Lanka” has been carried out from 2011 to 2016. VI And, based on the agreement between Vietnam and Japan, the JST-JICA SATREPS project entitled “Establishment of Environmentally Sound Management of Construction and Demolition Waste and Its Wise Utilization for Environmental Pollution Control and for New Recycled Construction Materials in Vietnam” has begun from 2018 and will continue until 2022. One of main activities in the both SATREPS project is to develop pollution control and environmental restoration techniques with site-specific, low cost, sustainable, environmentally friendly, and engineered/easy-construction. In this keynote address, some of developed and developing techniques with the use of locally available geo- and bio-materials and industrial by-products are introduced, and it is emphasized the emerging role of Geoenvironmental Engineering for developing those techniques.

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