After the energy crisis in 1974 in many countries and also in The Netherlands governments started Clean Coal research programs. Besides the problem of air pollution by SO2 and NOx it became clear that applications had to be developed for coal fly ash. Also it was recognised that leaching of heavy metals might result in water and soil pollution. This resulted in the development of leaching tests. In The Netherlands the leaching test was standardised also for other mineral waste materials. In a large study, called Mammoth project, various materials has been tested and upscaling was performed. With financial support from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Ministry for Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment, the first WASCON conference has been organised in 1991 in Maastricht, The Netherlands.
Following this first international conference the initiative was taken to establish an international society, in order to support the exchange of knowledge and know-how. Details about the aims of ISCOWA can be found on this CD-ROM and the ISCOWA homepage. This was the start of a series of WASCON conferences, the last one being held in June 2003 in San Sebastián, Spain. The proceedings of the first four conferences have been published by Elsevier Science publishers. Members of ISCOWA also starting to participate in the international journal Waste Management, also published by Elsevier.
In order to stimulate research ISCOWA started with an ISCOWA Award in 1994. Prof. dr. Joe Cabrera from the University of Leeds, was the first winner of this Award and as chairman of the international jury, he could give the second Award in the chain to Dr. H.A. van der Sloot from The Netherlands, who in his turn gave the third award to Dr. Ole Hjelmar from Denmark in 2000. In 2003 the winner was Rein Eikelboom from The Netherlands, who is now the chairman of the international jury for WASCON 2006.
All Awards are unique pieces of art specially designed by Dutch artists and symbolyse the goals of ISCOWA and the network of members.
As stated at the beginning of this introduction, research for applications and environmental control started already around 1975. So this is over 30 years ago, a normal period for the industry to cope with matters. However, environmentalists do still most of the work in this field and it is difficult to transfer results to the industry. It is strange, that engineers, working with cement and concrete, knowing that the hardening of concrete is a chemical process, are not more interested in the chemistry of leaching.
Looking forward, we can conclude that in the fields of technical and chemical processes progress has been enormous, also in legislation and quality control developments are increasing. At the five WASCON conferences a huge amount of experience and knowledge has been presented to in total about 1200 delegates coming from over 30 different countries. Preparations for the sixth WASCON conference have already started. We hope to present the latest results and developments in 2006 in Belgrade in Serbia. WASCON 2006 will be organised by TTPI and JINA. Via the ISCOWA homepage we keep you informed.
The board of ISCOWA would like to thank everyone who contributed to the conferences and to our society and invites you to become a member of ISCOWA and to help to contribute to a Sustainable Development.