The first of a series of seminars on innovation in the waste field kicked off on 14 May 2019. 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, under three topics:
- Use of Data for the optimization of collection;
- Use of Data for improvement in analysis and decision making;
- Use of Data to provide feedback to citizens.
The session showed that, already today, cities and regions across Europe are making an extensive use of data to improve their waste management systems and performances. However, they can achieve even more by working together, which is exactly the purpose of the WINPOL project. In this sense, the WINPOL project partners and European experts gathered in Maribor identified first opportunities for collaboration. 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 –will continue bilateral exchanges.
Thematic seminars are 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.
Presentations from the seminar are all available online on the event page.
