2023 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"

17th Edition

Phase 6 of 7

Publication Preparation 18/09/2023 - 06/11/2023

Process phases

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Mezitli: Biodegradable Waste Management

Official proposal

26/05/2023 13:19

Accepted

Mezitli is an agricultural city. Agriculture is one of the strongest sources of income, and throughout its history, income has been derived from agriculture. Today, despite the decreasing interest in agriculture, we should encourage agriculture as local governments.

Biodegradable Waste Management project aims to decrease climate change effects by supporting local agriculture, to enrich the soil by 100% natural methods consequently to increase ecological production, to improve number of fruit and vegetable producers -especially women producers and local businesses, to integrate public bodies and residents more, to encourage residents into volunteered services more etc.

The main idea of the project is created by the need of ecological solutions to get agriculture more active in the rural and residential areas. In the same way as every project of the municipality, this project should have been also created in the perspective of sustainable development goals, so it has been decided as nature friendly, aimed to reduce climate crisis effects on a local and global scale. We have determined that more than 50% of wastes derive from fruit and vegetable neighbourhood markets, and this bio wastes are interfuse with nonutilisable wastes so all the wastes go misuse.

So we have started the project directly from the source of the bio waste gathering point, and started a campaign of volunteered in the field of ecological consciousness, so a lot of residents from very different groups would like to work after their working day directly in the neighbourhood markets. The idea of collecting wastes as a group of different occupational groups and by that keeping the environment clean that they live in, reducing the climate crisis effects and contributing into local economy convinced the residents automatically.

Every day after 7 pm as soon as the neighbourhood market got closed, volunteer workers started working; swiping the floor, separating bio wastes and others, eliminates vegetables that still can be eaten. Approximately one and half an hour later, municipal cleaning services arrives and takes the separated bio wastes to the controlled disposal of waste area. In 6 to 8 weeks of periods biodegradable wastes turns into compost and distributes to producers in Mezitli. After distribution, composted soils gets more fertilized and produce more products, therefore there is more products, producers and green urban spaces now.