Global Waste Management Symposium 2008
Keynote Speakers:
Michael J. Walsh, Ph.D., is an Executive Vice President of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Inc., a self-regulatory exchange that administers a voluntary, legally binding greenhouse gas reduction and trading program for North America. Dr. Walsh also serves on the Board of Directors of the Montreal Climate Exchange.
In his prior position with Environmental Financial Products (the predecessor company to CCX), Dr. Walsh arranged several international carbon credit transactions and served as liaison and lead writer for a series of technical papers on international emissions trading prepared for the Government of Canada. As a consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development, Dr. Walsh provided instructional seminars on emissions trading for industry and government officials from several eastern European countries. He has been a speaker at United Nations climate conferences in Geneva, Kyoto, Buenos Aires, Bonn and The Hague, and has been a keynote speaker at industry conferences and educational workshops around the world.
Dr. Walsh has designed and managed annual auctions of sulfur dioxide emission allowances conducted as part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency acid rain reduction program. Dr. Walsh has delivered Congressional testimony and provided presentations to state public utility commissions, national regulatory conferences and industry seminars.
Dr. Walsh has been on the faculties of the University of Notre Dame and the Illinois Institute of Technology, and has lectured at Princeton, Northwestern, Colorado, Illinois and Johns Hopkins (Bologna). Dr. Walsh holds Bachelor of Science degrees in Economics and Political Science from Illinois State University, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Economics from Michigan State University. He has written extensively on the economics of energy efficiency and the implementation of efficiency programs, and has published articles in the National Tax Journal, Energy Economics, The Journal of Futures Markets, Derivatives Quarterly, Analyse' Financier, and Environmental Quality Management.
Mr. Rylander will discuss European policies on waste disposal and recycling and how these policies provide incentives to maximize recycling and energy production and minimize the use of landfills. He will share his thoughts about the ban on degradable organics and how the ban has resulted in greater biological pretreatment. In addition, Mr. Rylander will talk about extended producer responsibility programs in some European countries and compare this to his approach to waste-to-energy.
Håkan Rylander has been working in the field of waste management since 1972 following his Masters degree in Civil Engineering from the Technical University of Lund, Sweden. Currently, he is the CEO of SYSAV Company Group, South Scania Waste Company, a position he assumed in 1996. At SYSAV, a regional company owned by 14 municipalities, Mr. Rylander is promoting waste-to-energy and has written many articles on the topic. He is a member of a Working Group on Technical Development within the Energy Sector at the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and previously served as the Chairman of the Scania Society of Engineers and President of the International Solid Waste Association. In addition, he is the Deputy President of the Confederation of European Waste-to-Energy Plants, on the Board of Directors of the Swedish Association of Waste Management, and the Swedish representative in the Nordic Association of Waste Management.