In early March, waste and resources activists from Friends of the Earth groups across Europe gathered in Bulgaria for three days of training, skill-sharing and learning. Lili from Young Friends of the Earth Flanders was there to report back.
Spring arrived in Sofia the first weekend of March, and so did over 40 activists from all over Europe (Cyprus, Hungary, Malta, Ireland, Spain, Scotland, England, Latvia, Austria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Poland, Germany, Estonia, Slovakia, Denmark, Belgium and of course Bulgaria) to a 3-day gathering about resource and waste management and the circular economy.
After the adventurous arrivals of the participants, we started to get to know each other’s names through little games, which made it easier to identify each other. We also read about each group’s past and present activities and future plans concerning the topics of this event through the wonderful Art Gallery where everyone had to present themselves on a self-made poster.
Even during these conversations the same topics started to come up, such as food waste, community-based programmes, degrowth, water use, environmental education and artistic use of waste, zero waste and prevention, incineration and economic tools.
So with this in mind, we made smaller clusters to further discuss each topic in order to share our experiences. Happily we could do this outdoors, since the weather – like the mountainous scenery surrounding us – was simply beautiful and breathtaking.
And so after a brief presentation from the director of the Red Cross International Training centre (the place where this gathering took place, 15 km from the centre of Sofia), we went for a walk in the surrounding mountains to fill up with some more vitamin D and fresh oxygen to be even more productive in the next two days!
After this, we split into two groups for parallel sessions: one about working with marginalised communities and unequal resource distribution (Jaye from Shrub and Juraj from Priatelia Zeme/Friends of the Earth Slovakia); and the other about Zero Waste municipalities which was run by Marco from Zelena Akcija/Friends of the Earth Croatia.
Both seemed very interesting, so the choice was hard, but finally I went for the one held by Marco, where we learned what a badass action he made to unveil an illegal hazardous waste dump.
After our delicious dinner (if you haven’t had the chance to try Bulgarian cuisine, you ABSOLUTELY should! Believe me, you won’t regret it!) we kept talking enthusiastically about the issues of the day and Ciara from Shrub (swap and reuse hub ==> check them out here.) showed us how to make awesome little wallets from tetrapaks.
The 2nd day of the event was the ‘Experiencing Day’ (and WOMEN’S DAY!!; and one of our Hungarian participants’ birthday: Happy birthday once more Vera! 🙂 ) We started with a visit to an anaerobic digestion and composting facility, which has been in operation since 2014. These new biowaste treatment facilities treat approximately 13,000 tonnes of separately-collected garden and food waste from Sofia. More facts about it can be found here.
Our 2nd visit was to the industrial district of Kremikovtsi, a former uranium mine, smelter and the biggest ex-metallurgical plant in the Balkans. You can read more about it here.
We then headed to Sofia to have yet another delicious vegan lunch in the centre and to continue with the 3rd visit of the day. We had the chance to not only have Iliyana and Tanya with us during the whole gathering, but also to be given a tour by them of their upcycling workshop ‘Atelier Trion’. It was absolutely fascinating, so check out what they do here.
Finally the 4th visit was of the city of Sofia itself, but from a different angle… can you guess it? Through a quiz concerning its resources, consumption and waste! We split up into teams and started to collect the information asked in the quiz by discovering the market area.
Later on we met up to exchange our freshly acquired knowledge and participate after dinner in a lively and interactive debate and discussion on “Civilization collapse versus resource efficiency and technological idealism”, led by Todor of Za Zemiata/Friends of the Earth Bulgaria where a few more interested locals joined us.
We started the 3rd day with two workshops: the first was led by Matthew from Zero Waste Europe and Diana from Amigos de la Tierra/Friends of the Earth Spain who taught us how to communicate our messages to create change; and the second one was held by Martin and Bernard from Global 2000/Friends of the Earth Austria who showed us how to plan and organise campaigns and actions.
We followed our activities by brainstorming more concrete future actions with others working on common issues from our 1st day cluster session. We decided that it would be especially useful to create a ‘catalogue’ were we would write down methodologically our experiences concerning the above mentioned issues, and it would be available for all of the activists eager to take action – in order to make this world a better place step by step!
We finished by doing a recap of these amazingly rich three days and by promising further collaborations and engagements.
I would like to say to all the other participants as well the organisers of this fantastic event, the wonderful collaboration between Friends of the Earth Europe and Za Zemiata/Friends of the Earth Bulgaria.
Not only did we learn many new things about resource and waste management, but we also had the opportunity to meet inspiring people from all over Europe, giving us hope, strength and ideas to keep our smile and optimism to fight for social and environmental justice!
Thank you again!!!