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The scientific community strongly recommends the adoption of indicators for the evaluation and monitoring of progress towards sustainable development. Furthermore, international organizations consider that indicators are powerful decision-making tools. Nevertheless, the quality and reliability of the indicators depends on the application of adequate and appropriate criteria to assess them. The general objective of this study was to evaluate how indicators related to water use and management perform against a set of sustainability criteria. Our research identified 170 indicators related to water use and management. These indicators were assessed by an international panel of experts that evaluated whether they fulfil the four sustainability criteria: social, economic, environmental, and institutional. We employed an evaluation matrix that classified all indicators according to the DPSIR (Driving Forces, Pressures, States, Impacts and Responses) framework. A pilot study served to test and approve the research methodology before carrying out the full implementation. The findings of the study show that 24 indicators comply with the majority of the sustainability criteria; 59 indicators are bi-dimensional (meaning that they comply with two sustainability criteria); 86 are one-dimensional indicators (fulfilling just one of the four sustainability criteria) and one indicator do not fulfil any of the sustainability criteria.

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Waste collection is one of the most relevant parts of the integrated solid waste management system in technical, economic, environmental, and social terms. However, the vital role of waste collection has not been recognized, and the support given by the quadruple helixacademics, industry, state, and citizensis reduced when looking for the other operational units of an integrated solid waste management system. To exemplify the missing interest of academia for waste collection, in a Google Scholar search, the results for "waste collection" are about 157,000, for incineration are 375,000, and for landfill are 639,000. This example shows that collection is seen only as the way to make waste to get into high-tech infrastructures, like incineration plants, where real science is applied. The practitioners of the waste collection are the range of workers with lower income backgrounds, making waste collection not attractive enough to be devoted to high-tech solutions for waste collection problems. Many times, waste managers working in waste collection systems are more focused on the trucks and containers and the costs involved in the collection process, which is a considerable amount of local authorities' budget.In a meeting in 2014 between academia and waste collection sectors at the Nova University of Lisbon, waste collection professionals expressed the need for technical skills and knowledge based on waste collection and management practice, in a bottom-up approach. Technical skill areas include cost-efficiency, recycling behavior, environmental impacts, and technical operation. Waste collection professionals all over the world have the same necessities when implementing and managing a waste collection system to know more about the subject, but in such a way that knowledge could be affordable in technical and economic terms.The waste collection professionals' call to fulfill the technical background needs required experts in several fields of waste collection and management. This book results from the collaboration from different science areas and experiences in waste collection and management. Dr. Ana Pires, from whom the original idea was formed, has a scientific role in analyzing solid waste management from a system analysis perspective, where the application of life cycle assessment and multi-criteria decision-making are the techniques applied by her to make waste collection and

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