The 8th, 9th and 10th of May 2019, the Cities team went to Slovenia,  the top performing country in Europe, having met the EU 2020 recycling targets 4 years ago. This Study Tour aimed at disseminating good practices about waste management and better understand how Slovenia achieved its impressive results in such a short time.

What did we visit?

• The city of Ljubljana that offers results going beyond the national ones and committed to become a Zero Waste capital
• We visited the Snaga sites and had an overview of the waste management in the area and the future implementations of waste management priorities (reduce, reuse, recycle)
• The MBT plant
• Waste collection centre and REUSE centre with BERT (packaging free vending machine)
• The city of Vrhnika: in a country that until 2001 had no national targets for waste separate collection, the small municipality of Vrhnika showed how a community can quickly go from landfilling everything to recycling most of its municipal solid waste
• Bled and its Zero Waste Hotel: after reaching more than 92% separate collection, Hotel Ribno officially became the first Slovenian Zero Waste Hotel in 2018. Visit of the touristic city of Bled Well known for its lake with a castle in the middle, the city of Bled – overcrowded by tourists producing 70% of the annual waste – committed to Zero Waste by implementing waste management and waste prevention measures

For the first time this year we added a new module to our Study Tour: a workshop training on Zero Waste plans implementation where participants had the possibility to learn directly from skilled practitioners how to set up a programme for your municipality!

What did we learn?

• Implementing ZW schemes: operational and organisational approaches, execution, achievements,
• The economic and environmental benefits of Zero Waste programmes
• Economics and Mathematics of (Zero) Waste Management: facts & figures to reverse mistaken opinions

Photo credit © Tjaša Frida Jenko, Fridizia