On 11 December 2019, Representatives of BAMEE presented SMART WASTE during a public conference and a clustering meeting organised by the H2020 COLLECTORS project in Thessaloniki, Greece.
COLLECTORS aims at identifying and highlighting existing good practices of waste collection and sorting. It focuses on three waste streams: paper and packaging, waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), and construction and demolition waste (CDW).
More specifically, the main objective of the COLLECTORS project is to harmonize and disclose available information on different waste collection systems; to gain better insight into the overall performance of systems; and to support decision-makers in shifting to better-performing systems via capacity-building and establishing implementation guidelines.
Facilitated by ACR+, the COLLECTORS conference, entitled "municipal waste management in the circular economy: how to reach high-quality recycling?", brought together European experts from various territories to discuss the future of waste recycling and showcased the results of the COLLECTORS project on the identified good practices of waste collection, and their positive outcomes.
Municipal waste management has been evolving into more transversal strategies, tackling the challenges of waste prevention, and aiming to produce high-quality, secondary materials to be used as valuable resources for the recycling industry. Shifting towards waste management in a circular economy approach is a complex process, which requires the involvement of the citizens, cooperation with the different players of the recycling value chain, and the implementation of technical, organisational, communicative, and incentivising instruments. However, several territories achieved to reach high performances, leading to positive outcomes: generation of valuable recycled materials, reduction of carbon emissions, job creation, while keeping sustainable costs.
During the clustering meeting, SMART WASTE and two other relevant projects (Plasteco and Prompt) were briefly presented. The participants in the meeting learned more about the tools and results of COLLECTORS project and discussed the possibilities to facilitate knowledge sharing.
