THE PROJECT "O-DVA-JA-MO" STARTED IN BELA PALANKA

On Wednesday, November 9, a presentation of the Project for Household Waste Separation "O-DVA-JA-MO" was held at the Ecological and Recreational Center "Banjica", which is being implemented in the municipality of Bela Palanka in cooperation with the Ministry of Environmental Protection of the Republic of Serbia with the support of the European Union and the Kingdom of Sweden. The project aims to establish a system for waste separation at the point of origin in 17 municipalities across Serbia by investing in equipment and informing citizens about the advantages of separating household waste for its later successful recycling and reducing the amount of waste that ends up in landfills.

Bela Palanka, together with 16 other cities and municipalities, is part of the project aiming to establish the primary separation of municipal waste in four regions for waste management - Duboko, Srem-Mačva, Pančevo and Pirot.

All educational institutions in the territory of Bela Palanka municipality participated in the presentation of the project, so the children of the preschool institution "Dragica Valović" carried slogans on the topic of recycling and environmental protection, they also prepared an appropriate program, and the students of the elementary school "Ljupće Španac" also took part in it. High school students from Bela Palanka who were volunteers and participated together with other children in waste separation helped in the promotion of the project.

The goal of the Project for Household Waste Separation called "O-DVA-JA-MO" is to recycle part of the waste generated in households in order to reduce the amount that ends up in landfills, with the aim of increasing the recycling rate in 4 regions to 15 % in the next two years.

Miroslav Marinković, deputy mayor of Bela Palanka municipality, says that so far about 400 bins have been distributed to individual households, the bins are free of charge, and he invited citizens to be direct participants in the project, i.e. to carry out primary separation in their households.

"This is a project that started back in 2017, when we had applied for the project, a Memorandum of Understanding and Cooperation was signed in 2019, and partly due to the corona virus, partly because of all other events, we waited for the actual implementation of the project, but now we are in some kind of final phase, when the obtained equipment is distributed to citizens, and according to the plan of the public utility company, 2650 bins will be distributed by the end of December, that is, each individual household will receive its own bin for waste separation. Containers will be placed where there are collective housing or where there are buildings. Also, yellow containers will be placed at 35 locations in the city, which will be used for separating glass. As part of this project, we received a garbage truck and we received equipment in the form of these bins and containers, and we will see some of the first results expected from this project in the first quarter of 2023. A general goal is, of course, environmental protection, and a narrower goal is to reduce by some 20-30% the amount of waste that is currently being dumped at the Pirot Regional Landfill, and to send 20-30% of this to recycling. The obligation of our public utility company is to start collecting separated waste from November 21 and to take that waste to the Regional Landfill, where the new line or system for recycling that waste is," said Marinković.

The distribution of free bins in Bela Palanka began on November 1st, and it is up to the citizens to properly separate waste and use the bins they received according to the instructions they receive from PUC employees. This event sent a message that "everyone can now separate quickly and easily" and that all citizens can contribute to making Bela Palanka cleaner.