The current health situation pushes us to cultivate our creativity and to innovate in our working practices to achieve our goals. As many, it is online that the SMART WASTE team met, last Friday, to discuss the progress of the project. Here is a short summary of this virtual meeting.
For the past weeks, we reflected on identifying and collecting “Good Practice”, successful actions we developed in our territories, as well as flaws, “failures” in the policies we wish to improve during the lifetime of this project.
To do so, one of our priorities is to keep being active at all levels of governance. At the international level, for example, ACR+ started gathering data on the different systems and solutions implemented across Europe regarding waste management challenges caused by the COVID-19 crisis.
At national, regional, and local levels, we continued to get information, advice, and opinions from our territorial stakeholders. These stakeholders are representatives of the public and private sectors, or of the civil society, or they can be regular citizens, interested in the policies selected for this project. As they have different profiles, their availability varies greatly, making regular group meetings hard to organise, so we had to adapt. For instance, the Lead Partner ARRR favoured individual emails and calls, suiting their correspondent’s schedule the best (see their calls with Tufts Univesity and ECOTECA). Other partners, like KRWMC and BAMEE, could move their group meetings online, either with all participants or subdividing the group to make smaller ones.
Partners combined their stakeholders' consultations with the exchange of experiences. This is how team members from Kolding and Apeldoorn could identify and discuss similar issues faced by the two municipalities.
The semester is not over yet! Despite some remaining uncertainties, we stay positive and enthusiastic about the upcoming great opportunity coming this June 2020, so make sure you subscribe to our mailing list not to miss anything!
