AmbienDura

On 7 November, Ambiendura went to one of the biggest environment fairs in Lisbon: AmbiUrbe. Originally this event is organised biannually, but due to expected investments and increasing interest for the environment, it was organised already this year instead of 2008. About 150 different enterprises and organisations showed their environmental services. Many stands involved sustainable energy, but also water treatment, collection and treatment of waste, soil and energy reducing measures were presented. Furthermore Quercus and Ponto Verde, the organisation which promotes the selective collection, take-back and recycling of packaging waste in Portugal, were represented.

Our main interest went out to new initiatives and possibilities regarding the collection of waste in general and treatment of certain waste streams, namely Waste of Electronic and Electrical Equipment (WEEE), Construction and Demolition waste (C&D) and organic waste. Regarding the WEEE-stream, there are two initiatives in Portugal: ERP and AMB3E. Even though there is treatment capacity available, the collection of WEEE is still lacking; especially inland and in the Algarve region. For C&D, the newest and most efficient shredders showed their force at AmbiUrbe. But for this stream, an effective national law and an overall collection structure is still missing. Finally the organic waste stream. Currently most of the times still landfilled. In the north of Portugal (Porto area) and Lisbon area, exist an (over)capacity to treat biowaste and even recover energy. But again, difficulties in collecting the waste and ensuring a good quality of the compost (see also our previous blog entry) is also here a challenge. Perceiving the core business in Algarve, tourism, it is unfortunate that the management of biowaste is not sufficient. The thousands of hotels and restaurants generate tons of biowaste every day. It is there, that a separate collection system would work very well and provide a high quality input for generating compost or energy recovery.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 00:23 and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.