By: Rachel Hawkins, NDG Staff Writer
During the Jan. 31 Irving City Council Meeting, Brenda Haney, Solid Waste Department Director presented Irving’s latest Solid Waste Department project. Also in attendance were special guests, including 45 graduate students from 25 countries participating in the International Solid Waste Association’s Winter School (ISWA). The students visited the Hunter Ferrell landfill in hopes of learning from Irving’s best practices. The students are seeking ideas which will lead to the improvement of solid waste management in their home country.
The goal of the ISWA program is to promote advanced knowledge in the field of waste management to an international audience of existing and emerging solid waste experts, not just in Irving, but in other facilities as well.
Also according to their website, “At the joint ISWA and SWIS (Solid Waste Institute for Sustainability) Winter School at the University of Texas at Arlington, and the City of Irving, Texas, USA, the participants will have the opportunity to gain knowledge on the potential and challenges of sustainable waste management, including landfill and landfill mining.”
This is the fourth year for the event and they have now reached 75 different countries. They partnered with other cities in the DFW metroplex as well as the University of Texas in Arlington (UTA). The International Solid Waste Association’s Winter School was hosted by UTA.
The graduate-level students, whose goal is to work in the solid waste industry, competed to earn scholarships and the opportunity to visit the United States in their quest to learn more about solid waste management.
In the two weeks the students spent in North Texas (from Jan. 14 to Jan. 25), they had the opportunity to see how the land field operates, Irving’s new scale house, and also see city’s process of building a newer scale house.
To watch the full video on the students’ experiences visit here.
