The National Assembly brought together municipal environmental experts, NGOs, individual experts in the field of ecology and representatives of Ministry of Environment (MoEW) in Bulgaria to discuss and learn more about health impacts from air polution and waste management issues for local authorities.
The assembly was held online on 14 May 2021 from 10:00 till 16:00 and was attended by more than 70 participants. It was organised in two sessions.
The morning session included presentations dedicated to health effects from air pollution, the Bulgarian Action Plan on Waste Management and the changes in the National Law on Waste Management. The presenters were MD Simidchiev, Chairman of the “Air for health” association, state expert Anton Peychev, chief experts Stefan Alexandrov, Kameliya Georgieva and Alexander Ivanov from MoEW. Anna Larson, director of Reloop Europe and expert in UNDP with expertise in deposit systems and producer responsibility schemes presented how deposit systems could be applied on regional level.
The afternoon session started with a guest speaker Massimiliano Di Mattia representing the Tuscany Resource Recovery Regional Agency (IT) and Lead Partner in SMART WASTE project. He shortly presented the project and shared the experience of Tusacny Region in collection and treatment of biodegradable waste from households.
In the afternoon session two more Bulgarian Municipalities – Burgas and Gbrovo talked about their systems for composting and biodegradable waste collection and treating.
Important tool for monitoring environmental impacts specially of landfills on regional level and monitor the targets set in the national waste management strategy is the National Information Waste Management System, which was presented by Tatyana Michailova, chief expert in Environmental Executive Agency.
Yaka Krainc from Slovenian NGO Ecologists without borders and developer of the Waste management calculator. Evgeniya Tasheva, coordinator for Zero wastes in For the Earth Foundation presented how to recycle without big expenses - waste fees and taxes to help the implementation of the circular economy principals in the municipalities.
One important outcome of the assembly content and follow up discussions was the identified needs by the municipal ecology experts to have training on how to collect information on waste management, how to provide and analyse data from waste information data base (e.g. on the National Waste Information System, others), needs to be trained regularly on latest developments and changes in strategic documents on waste management and others.
More here.
