Last year’s autumn came with good news, the project that UBC Sustainable Cities Commission is part of has been approved by the Interreg BSR, and we are glad to announce that the project BALTIPLAST dedicated to reducing single-use plastic waste was kicked off on 8-10 of February 2023 in Riga.
The BALTIPLAST – Baltic Approaches to Handling Plastic Pollution under a Circular Economy Context project focuses on the prevention and reduction of plastic waste in the Baltic Sea Region with a particular emphasis on reducing single-use plastics, making improvements to packaging, and introducing new collection and treatment systems at the municipal level. The objective of the project is to create and deploy viable solutions to lessen the amount of plastic waste entering the Baltic Sea, with a focus on circular economy tactics. The project is a collaboration between partners from Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden to test solutions on three different levels: strategic and managerial, technological/technical, and communication/behaviour change.
To ensure the long-lasting impact on plastic waste management in the region, the consortium of 18 partners and 6 associated organisations encompasses some of the key actors in the plastic waste value chain, namely local authorities, universities and research institutions, associations and NGOs, as well as SMEs and large enterprises in the participating countries that operate in the waste management field. Most of the partners among the municipalities constituting the consortium are member cities of the UBC: such as Helsinki, Tallinn, Kaunas and Valmiera. The Union of Baltic Cities will use its extensive network of municipalities to maximize the benefits of the project to the Baltic Sea Region. This would reinforce the transfer of the results gained during the project and contribute to their better and smoother replication.
Solutions piloted during 3 years of the project will produce a comprehensive package to reduce single-use plastics and plastic packaging. Union of the Baltic Cities Sustainable Cities Commission will be leading the work together with Hamburg University of Applied Sciences to ensure extensive transfer of solutions to different target groups by launching the holistic BALTIPLAST Waste Management Platform (BPWPM). Among other materials and tools, an educational kit to learn on the subject of plastic reduction measures will be designed for employees of municipalities and public service providers.
UBC SCC attended the project Kick-off meeting and presented the overview of the planned transfer activities. The meeting, which lasted 3 days, brought new connections and refreshed already existing ones, and our team is looking forward to fruitful cooperation and synergies to reduce the single-use plastic in our cities in the coming three years.