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Common Waste

Common Libraries

Common Waste ©vertigo

In times of thousands of tonnes of waste in the Mediterranean and hardly developed infrastructure for recycling processes in South-East Europe, we would like to expand knowledge about waste prevention, recycling and circular economy and to network young initiators with each other.

Review: Final Event

Four teams– four completely different and innovative approaches to tackle the waste problem in Southeast Europe.

With the online final event on September 25th, the project Common Waste - Common Libraries is coming closer to its end. The benefit of the online event was that the organizers met almost 50 participants from all over the world, an audience that exceeded the usual project partners’ farewell party.

As this diverse audience was foreseen, after the intro and welcoming words from the Goethe Institute from Athens, there was a lecture about zero waste practices in daily life. As a broad topic, all participants at the final event warmly accepted it, regardless of their participation in the Common Waste - Common Libraries process. 

After this, the main stars of the final event showed up and all four teams that came out from the project’s process presented their ideas and current status.

They were presenting their projects in this order:
  1. Team Co-Lib – a project that promotes interesting and important topics for librarians with innovative design and, an open and inclusive approach.
  2. Team Drama-Queen – a project that connects theatre, art, and waste reuse approach
  3. Team Book it – a project that combines innovation and research in using old and discarded books or paper materials as a base for new materials through the power of fungi mycelium
  4. Team Sustainable Neighbours – a project that is educating librarians about sustainability
   
All projects were in their real active phase with many activities and achievements. This is even more important to emphasize since their work collided with the summer holiday period. We said at the beginning that the teams with their project Common Waste - Common Libraries came closer to its end, but there are many follow-ups and future activities by the teams so you can check more details about their projects below.

The 4 Teams and their ideas

Ideathon in Zagreb

After the selection of participants and an intro meeting online, the project Common Waste – Common Libraries started with a three-day Ideathon training (05 - 07th June) in Zagreb at the Goethe-Institut place and library. We have gathered 17 participants from seven countries in Southeast Europe.

During these three days, they learned about the waste problem, sustainable design and listened presentation of the good green library from the city of Karlovac in Croatia. Aside from learning, an even more important task for them was to set up transnational teams that would work on their ideas in the upcoming months. They initialized their ideas, discussed it, and created the teams on the second day of the training. This was a dynamic and intense process, so it was good that we were doing it in nature, at the Recycled Estate, a home of the project partner – Green Network of Activist Groups. Recycled Estate is an eco-social educational centre for permaculture design and sustainable living so participants were able to see how it looks when in practice someone tries to connect sustainability, commons, waste reduction, circular economy, and many more areas at once.

Like in a proper Ideathon and design thinking process, participants were boiling and framing, flying up and landing on the ground their ideas. During their internal discussion and as inputs from the facilitator and three mentors, ideas were further reframed and questioned, improved and clarified, and changed a bit or a bit more. We ended up with four teams that consisted not only of participants from different countries but also of participants who had different backgrounds. That means they are active at their workplace, in local communities, and in society by having different roles: librarians, activists for waste issues and sustainability, learners about the circular economy, and students or practitioners in design. They cover all of the most important topics of the project Common Waste - Common Libraries. Since the main goal of the project was to connect these areas with improvements in the library areas, it is interesting to list the final outcome of the Ideathon and four teams:


Co-Lib - supporting educational toolkit for librarians

Sustainable neighbors - survey on the state of the art in the libraries and educational program on sustainability for the librarians

Change the Script - using the theatre performance and reuse of paper in the pursuit of falling in love with the books

Book it - an idea that praises circularity with the reusing of paper to produce mushrooms that will end up like a possible construction material to implement in libraries

On the last day of Ideathon we came back to the library at Goethe-Institut Zagreb and that day was devoted to fine-tuning the project ideas and their presentation in front of the audience with Q&As. We have quite a diverse teams and ideas, so the next step is to polish and test them until September 2024.
 

Second day of Ideathon: Start of teambuiling and design thinking process at the Recyle Estate in Vukomerić | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović

Drazen Šimleša (ZMAG) guides through the eco-social educational centre for permaculture design and sustainable living “Recycle Estate” | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović

Warm up: The participants take on various tasks in nature | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović

Ivana Borovnjak gives a lecture on Meaningful Design | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović

The participants are listening and taking notes of the lecture | © Goethe-Institut & Matej Marjanović

The Open Space: Facilitator Yanina Taneva explains the process of design thinking to the particpants | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović

Participant Thomas presents his first project idea in the panel and seeks team members | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović

Participants Nikolas and Maria present their first project idea in the panel | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović

Break: vegan lunch from the open kitchen | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović

Group discussions between the participants and the mentors | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović

Participants Hilal (l.) and Meliha (r.) are working on their final presentation for the last day of Ideathon | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović


 

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Partners

Common Waste is being realised by the Goethe-Institut in Athens, Belgrade, Bucharest, Istanbul, Sarajevo, Sofia, Thessaloniki and Zagreb.
In cooperation with our partner Green Network of Activist Groups (ZMAG).