Unsorted waste in Croatia still accounts for 76% of total waste, and the goal is to reduce that share to below 50% by 2030, however, the fact that more than 100 smaller local government units do not sort waste at all is also a problem, it was said at a conference in Zagreb on Monday. Pročitaj više

The conference, entitled “Waste 2022”, brought together stakeholders of the national waste management system.

Cities and municipalities that are leaders in terms of waste sorting are Krk, Prelog, Cakovec and the entire Međimurje region, Krizevci, Koprivnica, Beli Manastir and Osijek, with the regions of Medjimurje and Istria leading the way in waste management, said Marijan Kavran, editor-in-chief of the Komunal magazine, which organised the conference.

The event focused on a number of topics, including the state of the sanitation vehicle fleet and ways for sanitation companies to modernise their fleets with climate-neutral vehicles.

Kavran said that more than 73% of sanitation companies had fleets that were between 10 and 20 years old.

“The Environmental Protection and Energy Efficiency Fund will no longer subsidise the purchase of vehicles using fossil fuels but only those using alternative fuels, however, we are not ready for that because we do not have a sufficient number of hydrogen fueling stations,” he said, adding that there was also not enough research to show if alternative fuels can enable the normal operation of sanitation vehicles given the extreme conditions they operate in.

As regards waste management centres, Kavran said that the first two such centres, Mariscina and Kastijun, can function very well, if certain improvements are made, while the third centre, Bikarac, has just ended its test run and is at a very high technological level.

One of the topics at the conference was a new, HRK 84 million tender published by the Environmental Protection and Energy Efficiency Fund for local government units for green infrastructure and co-financing of projects to green public areas.

Ivica Tikvic, a professor at the Zagreb Faculty of Forestry and Wood Technology said that this was the first such tender in Croatia.

The EU plans to plant three million trees by 2030, he recalled, warning that it was very important to secure conditions for the growth and maintenance of those trees.

“We should plant groups of trees, forests, and we should plant different species – trees and shrubs together because they help one another also in urban areas,” said Tikvic.