Expansion of the team and daring plans for the 2021
The project of creating municipal material cycles (MMC) has been very active and fruitful even during the epidemic lockdown. We are intensively preparing ourselves for the activation of new members and have onboarded a new member of the project team. In the following year, we will strive hard for the additional expansion of the project in several regions throughout Slovenia and elsewhere.
Špela Gutnik has been chosen to take over the position of National Coordinator of the project in Slovenia to ensure additional progress of this important circular economy project. For the last ten years, she’s been managing sales and marketing in one of the biggest Slovenian media companies. As a project manager she’s been actively involved in business development, implementing communication strategies and digitalization of the company. Her wide range of knowledge and experience in business management, sales and marketing will be a great asset in developing the MMC projects in Slovenia. As National coordinator, she is going to be in charge of creating new MMCs and reviving and attracting new members in municipalities, where MMC is already active.
The first and most important role of creating new MMCs is to increase awareness of the municipal corporations and members of the local public that they can encourage more sustainable development of their community. In other words – if they change the way of waste placement from their community, they are going to impact positively on the long-term development of community, business and environment in that community.
The municipal material cycle can be set up in any municipality or city in the EU that has has a municipal waste separation system in place.
Since waste separation is being efficiently set in majority of municipalities in Slovenia, the process of establishing new MMC’s should not be complicated. And cases that we have set up to this point show that establishing MMC is very important for the local communities also in terms of ecology.
As illustration, we are listing the following figures:
- the MMC has been successfully established in 10 municipalities in Slovenia; thus, the project covers 18,5 % of the total population;
- by now 17 million pcs (600 tonnes) of used beverage cartons have been collected;
- by now the project in total contributed to the 7.789 trees from being cut and reduced the CO2 emissions for 486.000 kg.
As MMC pioneers, Ljubljana, Novo mesto area and Brežice represent a valuable source of information and benchmarks, on the basis of which we can plan further development of the project.
We will strive to deliver the best possible results: we would like to double the number of residents in active MMC’s by the end of 2021.
Our mission is and remains the “Circular Culture”
On a global level, renewable resources are limited, and we are facing intensive population growth. To enable long-term sustainability, we need to start managing those resources much more economically – by extending their life-cycle and finding ways to reuse them.
This is exactly what we are doing with activating MMCs – in cooperation with municipalities, municipal corporations and residents, we are changing the purpose of existing waste management system. We are helping to transform it into a circular model. Beverage cartons, collected with a purpose in local communities are being submitted for regeneration process, to become a source of raw materials for new paper hygiene products. Those products are returned to the same local communities where the beverage cartons were collected as a source of raw material. That's how the material cycle is closed.
Slovenia is using 3 planets worth of renewable resources
In 2020 Earth Overshoot Day landed on August 22nd , while according to EOD statistics, Slovenia has used all their renewable resources already by April 26th .
By establishing MMCs, where we enable and promote reuse of beverage cartons, we directly influence on the improvement of ecological statistics of Slovenia. We sincerely hope to be able to significantly stimulate the Circular Economy and promote sustainable development.
