waste@nova

1. WHAT IS UrbanWINS ABOUT?

UrbanWINS – Urban metabolism accounts for building Waste management Innovative Networks and Strategies – will develop and implement eco-innovative strategic plans for waste prevention and management that will boost urban environmental resilience and contribute to a shift towards more sustainable production and consumption patterns. It will also seek to improve the recovery of waste and use of materials recovered.

To achieve the objectives of UrbanWINS, this approach will be taken:
1) An in-depth analysis of the waste prevention and management strategies from 24 cities in six countries (Austria, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Sweden) will be carried out.
2) Stakeholders will then be invited to join virtual and face-to-face discussions to share their ideas and concerns.
3) Eight pilot cities - Cremona, Albano Laziale, Pomezia and Turin (Italy), Bucharest (Romania), Manresa and Sabadell (Spain) and Leiria (Portugal) – will develop and test strategic plans for urban waste prevention and management.

The process will also enable those taking part in UrbanWINS to attain a better understanding of what their cities consume and discard. This information shall help cities to better assess how to prevent, reduce and re-use waste.

UrbanWINS is a three-year project which was launched in June 2016, and is funded by the European Commission’s H2020 Programme.

To find out more, click here

2. PROJECT NEWS

Over 50 people from six different countries were in attendance at the Urban WINS kick-off conference in Cremona (Italy) on 27 September. The event was officially opened by the Mayor of Cremona, Gianluca Galimberti, who underlined the importance of co-operation between cities at the European, national and regional levels.

Those who attended the event in Cremona also had the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the objectives of UrbanWINS and the concept behind it.Leonardo Rosado, from Chalmers Technology University in Sweden, explained that urban metabolism looks at cities as living organisms: it works on changing urban lifestyles and closing material loops.Giulia Lucertini, from the University of Venice, highlighted how strategic planning allows developing general measures to reduce waste at the source. Mara Pesaro, from the Municipality of Cremona and Co-ordinator of UrbanWINS, explained the project’s challenges and emphasised the importance of reaching a wide range of stakeholders and get them engaged.

Another six (national) conferences will take place during the course of the project, as well as final event to wrap up the project.

Picture copyright: UrbanWINS team

One of the first main actions in UrbanWINS is for the consortium to conduct an in-depth analysis of urban waste prevention and management strategies in 24 European cities across six different countries: Austria, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Sweden.

This means that apart from the already selected pilot cities, 16 other cities will form part of this analysis. In Italy, the cities taking part will be Venice, Padova, Monterotondo and Fiumicino. The cities selected in Spain are L’Hospitalet de Llobregat and Salou. The strategies of the Portuguese cities ofCastelo Branco, Figueira da Foz, Penacova and Viseu will be analysed, whilst in Romania, it will be those of Pitesti, Oradea and Iasi. Vienna (Austria) and Gothenburg (Sweden) complete the list. A further four cities from Sweden will be revealed in the coming weeks.

This analysis will contribute to the subsequent assessment of how cities can prevent, reduce and re-use waste.

The success of the development and implementation of the innovative waste management strategies (WMS) relies on the active participation of all relevant stakeholders: from civil society through to companies and governments. Until now, 393 entities from the six participant countries have joined the project. 

Waste prevention and management questionnaire: Help us to gain a better understanding of your role, interests and commitments concerning consumption and production patterns, waste prevention strategies and participatory decision-making in order to identify the most appropriate means to involve you in the future activities of UrbanWINS by filling in this questionnaire. 

Share with us and disseminate your experiences, technologies or detailed data on innovative WMS, by filling in this questionnaire. 

The waste prevention and management questionnaire is also available in German /Austrian, Italian,Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and Swedish. The second mentioned survey to gather information about your experience is also available in Romanian and Spanish. 

Picture copyright: CC0 License - Pixabay

    
During the first months of the project, several of the pilot cities and project partners have taken part in events where they had the opportunity to present UrbanWINS to a wider audience.

At the “European Recycling Society – natural resources and waste management” Conference, Magdalena Iuga, Director of the Public Utilities Unit of the Municipality of Bucharest presented quantitative indicators on waste collected in the city in 2015, and highlighted the importance of the UrbanWINS project for Bucharest. She also explained that the strategic plans and the best practices toolkit will be key instruments for municipalities that are in the process of moving towards a more circular economy.

The Municipality of Leiria (Portugal) invited the Portuguese partners involved in UrbanWINS – FCT NOVA, University of Coimbra, and CEIFAcoop – to a meeting to discuss in detail the objectives, methodologies and the project’s work plan. Participants created new synergies and fixed the areas of priority to be discussed with the other European partners.

The cities of Manresa and Sabadell (in Spain) together with the Fundació CTM Centre Tecnològicorganised a press conference attended by journalists from regional and local media, who showed great interest in the project’s goals and actions to be carried out, especially those which seek to engage the general public. The UrbanWINS partners involved also presented the project at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona to a number of local government representatives and other interested bodies.

Pictures copyright: UrbanWINS team

3. RELATED NEWS

A webinar for the members of the PPI4waste Interest Group took place last Monday 21 November with the aim of answering the question ‘What’s Waste Worth?’. The online event was used to explore different approaches to waste management, and included a discussion on the use of performance-based indicators within waste contracts with waste expert Michiel Westerhoff, from Circulus Berkel (in The Netherlands). Michiel Westerhoff presented Circulus Berkel’s approach to reaching a residual waste-free region by 2030.

Blanca Valenzuela explained the challenges that the Mancomunidad de Municipios del Sur in Spain is currently facing with their waste treatment facilities, and shared some of the potential solutions that are being explored. Anne Furphy, from Instituto Andaluz de Tecnología (IAT), PPI4waste co-ordinator, talked about the opportunities for Interest group members to get involved in the project. PPI4waste promotes public procurement of innovation for resource efficiency and waste treatment.

A recording of the webinar, as well as the presentations, are available online by clicking here.

If you would like to become a member of the Interest Group, receive the latest news and be involved in discussions about waste management and public procurement, visit this online link.

Workshop opportunity: The PPI4waste consortium is organising a workshop focused on the question "why is there a need to innovate in waste and how can public procurement of innovation help practitioners achieve this?" The workshop will take place on 31 January, from 10:00 to 14:30 in Frankfurt, Germany. For more information, contact them here.

REPAiR - a new project funded by the European Union (funded under theHorizon 2020 Programme) which began in September 2016 - seeks to provide local and regional authorities with an innovative trans-disciplinary open source geodesign decision support environment (GDSE) developed and implemented in living labs in six metropolitan areas. The GDSE allows creating integrated, place-based eco-innovative spatial development strategies aiming at a quantitative reduction of waste flows in the strategic interface of peri-urban areas.

These strategies will promote the use of waste as a resource, and thus support the ongoing initiatives of the European Commission towards establishing a strong circular economy. The identification of such eco-innovative strategies will be based as much as possible on the integration of life cycle thinking and geodesign in order to operationalise urban metabolism. The approach of REPAiR differs from previous Urban Metabolism as it introduces a reversed material flow accounting in order to collect data accurate and detailed enough to allow for the design of a variety of solutions to place-based challenges.

During the UrbanWINS Kick-off Conference in Cremona, first synergies were established between UrbanWINS and the REPAiR project.

For more information about the REPAiR project, please contact: Repair-bk@tudelft.nl

Graphic copyright: Libera Amenta

4. UPCOMING EVENTS

Save the Planet is the only specialised business event in Bulgaria dedicated to waste management, following the trend of replacing the ‘take, make, dispose' model with a ‘circular economy’ approach across Europe. The exhibition’s focus is the South-East European market, which must respond timely to the growing environmental damage. The exhibition and the conference will take place from 7-9 March 2017 in Sofia, Bulgaria. Learn more here.

The REFRESH multi-stakeholder conference will include presentations, discussions and interactive sessions with REFRESH researchers, networking sessions, presentation of the REFRESH Food Waste Solution Contest winners, as well as a public food waste event together with REFRESH partner Feedback. REFRESH will also collaborate with the Food Surplus Entrepreneurs Network to bring food waste innovators and experts together in an Incubator Day for food waste projects on 19 May 2017 as part of the conference.

REFRESH (Resource Efficient Food and dRink for the Entire Supply chain) is an EU research project which aims to take action against food waste. The conference will take place from 18-19 May 2017 in Berlin, Germany. More information is available here.