EDITORIAL

EcoEng Newsletter No. 12, June 2006

Good winds for ecological engineers!

Content No. 12/06

Title page / Index

Editorial

Articles:

Water from the well

Phototrophic biofilms

Cameroon:
optimising waste flow

India: Water supply
schemes in a slum

Austria: Sewerless city

Composting: Ch. 5

PNG: Ecosan project

IEES:

Biopros project

Ecosan curriculum CD

EcoEng News:

Newsbits

Satire:

Joe Swamp

Various issues:

IEES Writers' Fund

Calendar

Mailing list

Credits

EE-Newsletter Flier

By Andreas Schoenborn-Schaller
EcoEng-Newsletter co-editor
armadillo media
PO Box 2116
CH-6002 Luzern
Switzerland

If I look around in Europe and the world, winds for Ecological Engineering are getting better. Ecological sanitation projects are popping up in many places of the world as has been documented by the Ecosanres project (related news item in this issue).

IEES has started to act as so called "industrial association group" (IAG) for projects of the European Union. Katharina Conradin reports about the Biopros project and two other project that have been made possible by this development.

The reform of the European university sector has finally lead to the introduction of the Bachelor / Master system. New Ecological Engineering Master classes are in the pipeline at various places.

Next IEES meeting:
August 2006

In this context, the next IEES board - and general meetings in August 2006 are gaining an additional importance. By the way: The board meeting is open to all IEES members! You "just" have to make your way to Aas, Norway.

Since this will be impossible for most IEES members, together with this newsletter a preparatory discussion group has been opened where you can leave notes about your wishes and needs for the further development of IEES.

New IEES logo

IEES has got a new logo. So, below is a last tribute to our old logo, which was first designed at an EcoEng conference in Beijing in the 1990s. It stood for Yin and Yang in nature and man's interference in it (at least that's how I understood it).

The new logo looks by far more professional. Yet, in my perception it lacks some of the warmth of the old one ... Anyway, the challenge now is to live up to the slogan "Engineering with an attitude", adopted from David del Porto.


The new IEES logo	The old IEES logo

Quality criteria for good Ecological Engineering

"Engineering with an attitude"? The better our vision gets known in the public, the more important simple and comprehensive quality criteria for good ecological engineering will become. Currently, a number of quality criteria exist (a compilation can be found in Hein van Bohemen's book), by different authors and grouped in many different ways that are deeply stained by the ethics, political and social background of their authors.

This summer semester I gave a few guest lectures about quality criteria for good ecological engineering in a class at UAS Waedenswil taught by Ranka Junge. The students were then asked to assess a number of projects by using a set of criteria of their choice, based on the information they could find on the web. They wrote down their assessments. A selection of them will be published in the next ecoeng-newsletter in November.

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Thanks a lot for your continued interest and suppport.

Andreas Schoenborn-Schaller
Lucerne, Switzerland, June 20, 2006

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