A survey of landfill workshop participants highlights the need and opportunities for cross-border European cooperation.
Organizing a workshop lasting several days under pandemic conditions is a major challenge for any organizer. If this is also to take place in two languages as usual, it doesn't make the preparations any easier. "Fortunately, we found an online tool that allowed us to translate simultaneously without any problems," says Ingrid Henze with relief.
The urban ecologist at the iTN - Institute for Peat and Natural Product Research was co-organizer of the 16th Zittau-Liberec Landfill Workshop, which took place online for the first time as a conference entitled "Waste Treatment in the Saxon-Czech Border Region" from 12 to 13 November 2020.
"In this way, participants from all parts of Germany were able to connect, for whom a trip to Liberec would have been impossible. There was also a solution for personal expert discussions in small groups with translators available in the virtual room."
From the challenges of waste disposal in the healthcare sector to contributions on waste treatment processes and groundwater contamination, a series of presentations on waste, waste treatment and landfills in the Neisse-Nisa-Nysa Euroregion enabled experts from Germany and the Czech Republic to exchange ideas, update each other on the latest developments and identify topics that need to be developed and addressed in further workshops in line with the conference theme.
An online survey among the participants, which was presented at the evening event during the conference, proved to be particularly valuable for the latter.
"When different stakeholders from different sectors and countries come together, the opportunity should be taken to ask this consortium about current issues," explains Ingrid Henze. "On the one hand, it was about the unique selling points of Lusatia as well as the opportunities for cross-border European cooperation and how this can be intensified."
According to the survey, all participants see a need to strengthen cross-border cooperation and would like to see more intensive research activities as well as exchanges in the technical field.
More than 50 percent of participants are interested in exchange programs or have already taken part in them. Over 70 percent call for new or amended standards and framework conditions in the field of waste management.
In addition, many participants stated the need to find and implement practical and not over-regulated solutions with regard to waste management as part of a conscious resource economy. "This will give rise to a new thematic block for the 2021 landfill workshop," Ingrid Henze promises. "This also applies to the topic of mining pits as underground landfills, which is currently the subject of disagreement."
A date for the next landfill workshop has already been set.
This year, the "Circular Economy - & Landfill Workshop Zittau-Liberec" will take place online from November 3 to 5, 2021. The program of the German-Czech event with simultaneous translation extends over three days, each from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
The full program of the Landfill Workshop 2020, the survey results of the participants and the presentations on the respective topic blocks can be found here.
These include, in particular, the presentations on the topic of waste treatment processes, in which the results of two current iTN projects will be presented.
The project International Expert Workshop "Waste Treatment in the Saxon-Czech Border Region" was funded by the European Union from the European Regional Development Fund under the Cooperation Program for the Promotion of Cross-border Cooperation between the Free State of Saxony and the Czech Republic 2014-2020.
