Regional, 11th consecutive, waste conference ASWA 2024 has gathered panelists from all the former Yugoslav countries, Poland and Hungary, as well as representatives of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the City of Novi Sad, and the Embassy of Poland in Serbia. At this conference, the participants share experiences and discuss how to improve communal waste management, especially in large urban areas of the region.
- Until last year, we’ve held these conferences across Serbia, then decided to settle down in Novi Sad to show how waste can be successfully managed – said the President of the Executive Board of the National Association of Communal Companies of Serbia ASWA 2024 Goran Čabradi. - We will discuss experiences from the region's capital cities in managing communal waste. The presence of landfill managers from the regional capitals is a chance for us to contemplate the reoccurring landfill fires, what causes them, and how to remedy the consequences.
The goal of the Association is to affirm waste management, through formal panel discussions and later informal communication, for the decision makers to realize the importance of the problem so that together we can find solutions for a healthier environment, for more investments in the environment, and for mobilizing others to recycle – added Čabradi.
Over the last few years, according to Čabradi, great progress has been made in waste management in the entire region. - For decades this problem has been overlooked and landfills have been turned into junkpiles. Our country and the Ministries, as well as regional countries, are making huge efforts, step by step actions, to turn those junkpiles into neat landfills – concluded Čabradi.
Tamara Milković, from the Public Utility Company “Komunalije” from the city of Sremska Mitrovica, has reminded the present company, how this city has decided to self-govern the development of waste management from 2011, and in 2013 the city installed a primary waste separation system.
A Unique Fair inside a Fair
This year, within the Ecology Fair, a specialized Fair of communal, utility equipment, and green technologies ASWA 2024 is being held, and it contains 12 exhibitors, domestic and foreign. It is expected, based on the contract of long-term cooperation between the ASWA Association and the Novi Saf Fair, that this specialized fair within a fair, becomes a recognisable gathering of the green, communal, sector in the entire region.
