Circular economy, counteracting waste generation, increased responsibility of producers introducing packagings on the market and thermal waste conversion are only some of the subjects covered by a visit to Spain paid by the Working Group on Waste Management, operating within the „Partnership: Environment for Development” Network.
During the visit, the Group representatives visited Madrid and Barcelona, two largest cities of Spain, which approached the issue of waste management in a completely different way. In Madrid, the authorities chose a centralised waste management system, based on the activities of market entities supervised by the management company selected by way of a tendering procedure. In Barcelona, it was decided to implement a distributed system, as close as possible to residents, where large emphasis was placed on environmental education and support for selective collection of household waste.
As it turned out during the discussions with representatives of the authorities of both cities and officials of the Ministry of Economy, both models had a number of advantages and disadvantages, mainly focusing on problems of cooperation with residents during waste collection and transfer. The advantages include an undoubtedly easier way to demonstrate achieving the ecological objective in the centralised system, a significant reduction in waste generation and a much better waste segregation in the distributed system.
In addition to meetings in the offices, the participants in the visit also saw the Madrid technology park Valdemingomez – a complex of processing, storage, segregation, composting, incineration and reuse of waste, as well as selective municipal waste collection points in Madrid and Barcelona, organised in accordance with the waste management models adopted in both cases.
The visit was organised by the General Directorate for Environmental Protection as part of the project “Continuation of support for the functioning of the network of environmental authorities and managing authorities of EU funds “Partnership: Environment for Development for 2018-2019” co-financed by the Cohesion Fund as part of the Technical Assistance Operational Programme 2014-2020.
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