The city of Zagreb is throwing away about 155 million kuna (about 21 million euros) on the Jakuševac landfill every year. Zagreb could turn that money to profit if only the City provided separate collection of different types of waste deposited there and then selling it on the secondary raw materials market.
Due to an inadequate system of separate waste collection, the European Commission placed Zagreb on the last place out of 28 EU capitals in the separation and recycling of waste in its 2015 report.
Therefore, today, A Right to the City (Pravo na grad) and Green Action (Zelena Akcija) activists carried out a protest action in front of the city administration where they came with a truck full of bags of fake money that they just threw away wearing masks with the face of Milan Bandic, carrying a banner "Zagreb: European Capital of rubbish". With this protest action they warned that in the last 16 years of the rule of Milan Bandic in the Zagreb, billions were thrown away on a landfill. Not only does the City intend to continue with this practice, but is planning to spend another nearly 3 billion kuna (400 million euros) to build incinerators where all this valuable waste would be incinerated and harmful for the citizens health and the environment.
With the recent reduction in the number of scheduled mixed waste pick-ups and without improving both separation and billing system (which again did not the provide the fee to be equal to the amount of waste actually produced within a household), we are up to our ears in trash. In some parts of the city the waste bins are overflowing, in the others they are being collected half-empty, and most of the citizens refuse to pay larger bills for the waste they did not actually produce. Such collection system is unfair and recently declared illegal in the high administrative court.
In the past 16 years the city government led by Milan Bandic was not able to create a waste management system for the benefit of the citizens of Zagreb, therefore we do not believe that it will do so in the future. The attitude of the city government to treat waste as garbage, not as a valuable resource is one of the main symptoms of general extravagance and arrogance in the management of our assets and resources. Of all the political actors to be nominated in the local elections we ask that their programs give priority to the alarming state of waste management and insist on financially, socially and environmentally sustainable solutions that are already tested and successfully carried out throughout Europe through the model of separate waste collection and recycling.
We are fed up with trash!
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Photos from the protest are here.
Facebook page of the campaign is here.
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