Communal waste management – case study for Slovenia |
The unprecedented quantities of waste produced today have critical environmental implications, from resource inefficiency and climate change to social injustice and local human health effects. In addition, the generation of wastehas been one of the most prevalent byproducts of human activity in history. The old approaches of waste management as eg. burying or dumping the waste, however, are no longer acceptable: environmentally, economically, or socially. Moreover, the predicted levels of increase in population, production, and consumption in this century will raise the quantity and complexity of waste materials. If global problems such as climate change and waste remain unresolved, societies will be forced to continue attempting to incrementally reduce waste and lessen environment alimpacts. Logically, there is a need for sustainable waste management, sustainable communal waste management in particular, whose goal is to eliminate waste wherever possible by encouraging a systems approach that avoids the creation of waste in the first place. Furthemore, it should be noted that waste represents potential raw materials and is being increasingly rerouted from admittedly orderly, environmentally-friendly dumps to waste recycling industry using technology which produces useful raw materials, compost or fuel. In this process of waste transformation, everyone has to take part separating waste during collection. In order to achieve their objectives of sustainable communal waste management, the European Union countries that have so far done most in this field, have applied innovative waste collection systems based upon identification technologies which encourage users to separate waste at the source of its creation. This paper presents a real examle of Communal Waste Management in Slovenia.
Aleš Gabršček, Sonja Išljamović |