The Belgrade monthly magazine Business and Finance writes that “the most promising sectors for the application of the circular economy model” in Serbia are agriculture, processing industry, production of electronic devices and packaging.
It is stated that 12 million tons of waste are produced in Serbia every year, of which 10 million tons are waste from mining, energy and construction.
Although these quantities could be significantly reduced, the greatest potential for better treatment has a different type of waste – municipal waste, which annually in Serbia has about 2.2 million tons. If managed properly, this waste could, instead of being dumped, be processed into “pet food”, “green energy”, compost.
“The applied principle of circular economy in practice would look like this: produce optimally-use adequately-separate properly-recycle-return to production. However, in Serbia, the linear concept still dominates, according to which waste is not recycled, but produced, used and disposed of in landfills,” writes Business and Finance.
The program of NALED and the German Development Cooperation “Waste Management in the Context of Climate Change (DKTI)”, implemented by the German GIZ, proposes amending the law to encourage the development of the “circular concept”.
“Amendments to the law are necessary, but, on the other hand, it is a great challenge to implement these regulations, primarily due to the lack of appropriate infrastructure. In order for the amendments to the law to make sense, we must have special containers for waste separation and sanitary landfills. Also, we now have only 10 sanitary landfills and more than 120 municipal ones that do not meet even the minimum standards,” said Slobodan Krstovic, from NALED.
He added that it is estimated that there are more than 3,500 “illegal landfills” in Serbia, and “we must urgently address this in order to, as a candidate country for EU membership, get as close as possible to their directives in this area,” said Krstovic.
There are a total of 4,571 types of municipal waste generated by the economy in Serbia. There are also 331 companies that reuse waste and 32 that dispose of it.
“The reality is that 99 percent of food waste, which we generate 250,000 tons a year in Serbia, ends up in landfills, where all the amount of such waste is converted into methane, carbon dioxide and other dangerous gases. There is no need to explain that carbon dioxide is the most important cause of climate change, that is, global warming, and at the same time it endangers the environment and human health,” said the regional manager of EsoTron, Bojan Gligic.
The caterers annually procure 123,000 tons of food, of which 20 percent immediately discard it because it is bones, shells or crusts, and another 15 percent remain in plates, according to NALED.
Gligic’s proposal is to separate food from other waste, then to process it and in that way create energy that is further used in a production process where waste is created again and so in a circle, “circularly”.
“It is an ideal example of a circular economy. When the economy realizes the value of the circular principle of waste management, at the same time we will get a healthier environment and corporate responsibility of the companies we have been striving for for decades,” said Gligic, Danas reports.
