COMMUNICATING OUTPUTS, OUTCOMES AND IMPACTS OF WASTE-RELATED RESEARCH: THE “EMERGE” CASE STUDY

Communication, dissemination and exploitation of research findings is vital to maximise research impact. This is increasingly important as society faces sustainability challenges that require people to be educated about a broad range of issues spread across academic disciplines, and this is especially true of the waste management industry. Despite this need, effective approaches to communication, dissemination and exploitation can be challenging. This paper presents the EMERGE project as a case study, presenting the approaches used, identifying areas of success and highlighting areas for further improvement. This reveals a successful strategy to communicating with scientific audiences but highlights the considerable potential for improvements in the approach to communicating with the general public. New approaches to social media usage for research projects need to be considered, such as working with social media professionals, using a greater variety of apps and proactive collaboration with influential users/accounts.