BLUEISLANDS
WINPOL | How can waste management benefit from the use of information and data?
Information can be used to optimise waste collection, improve analysis and policy-making in the field of waste, and provide feedback to the citizens to steer their behaviour in the desired direction. Already today, cities and regions across Europe are doing this, but they can achieve even more by working together. This is the outcome of the first seminar of the WINPOL project, where European experts exchanged good practices and identified first opportunities for collaboration.
Maribor, Slovenia – On 14 May 2019 the first of a series of seminars on innovation in the waste field kicked off in the framework of the European-funded project WINPOL. This event was hosted by Snaga, the public waste management company of the City of Maribor, and focused on the collection and use of information to optimise waste management. It gathered project partners and their local stakeholders to exchange relevant good practices existing on their territories. Additional experiences were brought by external experts invited by ACR+, the Advisory Partner of the project.
More than 10 practices, interesting and inspiring to both project partners and external experts, were presented during the seminar, which is part of the “Interregional Learning” phase of the project. This phase is meant for WINPOL partners to exchange, identify good practices and elaborate action plans on the transfer of relevant experiences on their territories. Thus, the meeting also included two site-visits to Snaga’s installations: the automated sorting plant for communal waste and one of the three collection centres located in the city of Maribor. The seminar already counts with successful outcomes as the project partner City of Antwerp and two of the experts invited by ACR+ – LIPOR, the public waste management of the wider Porto region in Portugal, and the City of Amsterdam in the Netherlands – identified possibilities for collaboration and will continue bilateral exchanges.
In the following months, partners will continue identifying good practices in preparation of the second thematic seminar focusing on innovative models for collection, prevention and recycling, which is set to take place in late Autumn 2019 and hosted by the City of Antwerp. In the meantime, local actors in the partners’ territories can get involved in the WINPOL project through a series of events organised by the partners.
Maribor, circular economy in action
The WINPOL project meeting was not the only event linked to circular economy happening in Maribor this week. On 16 and 17 May 2019, Maribor is hosting the 4th edition of the Circular Change conference. The ambition of this edition is to move towards “less talk, more action”, that is translating the numerous reports, data, guidelines and other documents existing on circular economy into concrete actions, radical collaboration and scalable success stories. ACR+ has contributed to this conference by sharing good practices from its network and highlighting the importance of collaboration in a session on the future of food and packaging.
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Contact:
ACR+ Secretariat - Bilyana Spasova
E-mail: bs@acrplus.org
Tel: +32 2 234 65 00
