As part of its full-scale experimentation on bio-waste collection and sorting in CityLoops, the city of Mikkeli is carrying out a city-wide awareness raising campaign targeting residents to encourage them to sort their bio-waste. Among other activities, this campaign includes participation in targeted events, such as the Recycling Market in August and September and the Energiansäästöviikko, the Energy Saving Week, in October.

The Annual Recycling Market for Mikkeli’s youths

On Monday 30.08 and Friday 03.09, Mikkeli's team joined the annual Recycling Market in Mikkeli, organised in conjunction with the Climate Change Awareness Project. At the event, they promoted the recycling of biowaste to Mikkeli’s young adults, showed how to fold a bio-waste paper bag from newspapers, and explained how the garbage trucks in Mikkeli are running on biofuel made out of biowaste.

The event proved an excellent opportunity to collaborate with different youth projects in Mikkeli - such as the Yhdessä project and Ohjaamo Olkkariand - to further motivate the city’s youths to carry on with recycling biowaste and to work on environmental issues. This could potentially lead to a future collaboration between the attending projects on bio-waste recycling. Some of them have also been invited for the next bio-waste recycling workshop on 16 November.

The Energy Saving Week (Energiansäästöviikko)

The Energy Saving Weeks have been organized yearly by Motiva Ltd since 1996 to promote energy saving and sustainable consumption. The 2021’s edition took place in October and focused on communicating how to curb climate change by using energy wisely, thus reducing environmental impact. Mikkeli’s partners Miksei and Xamk participated in the event to present CityLoops and raise-awareness on bio-waste collection.

As for the Recycling Market, the aim was to motivate people to recycle their bio-waste, emphasizing climate-related benefits associated with end-products such as transport biogas and soil improvers. Participation also gave the opportunity to learn more on barriers to separate collection experienced by residents through insightful conversation with passers-by, such as small households in detached housing not producing enough waste to fill the container bin every week. It also allowed to identify solutions to overcome these barriers, such as Bokashi composting which could be an easier and cheaper way to recycle small amounts of household biowaste. These discussions also enabled Mikkeli’s team to learn how widespread was the use of biodegradable plastics by households and how unaware were people of how a biogas plant works.

Further events and activities will take place in Mikkeli in the coming month to keep raising awareness on bio-waste collection and progress towards the circular transition.

For more information (in Finnish) on the project, please visit Miksei's and Xamk's websites.

For more information on Mikkeli’s work in CityLoops, click here.