Common Waste

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.
   

Participants