the Municipality participates in the call for funding

Il Municipality of Brindisi try, thanks to Interreg cross-border cooperation programmeto reintroduce a service that worked excellently until a few years ago. This concerns, in particular, the reuse center that the municipal administration intends to create in the Sant’Elia district.

INSIGHTS

What is a reuse center

A reuse centre, in particular, is an equipped space in which everyone can deliver what they no longer need and which can be useful to others, thus extending the life cycle of goods, with advantages for the economy and for the environment. First of all because much less material ends up in landfill. Instead of dismantling and throwing away objects that are no longer needed, in fact, it is possible to leave them in a place where someone can take them and reuse them. In the most banal ways, as could happen for example with used books and toys, but also in more creative and even artistic ways. Not to mention the possibility of having, on site, as happens in the most “advanced” and evolved reuse centers, a workshop for repairing what no longer works. And there are also those who organize courses to teach everyone how to fix their own objects, but also those found in the center, and even artistic recycling workshops. Demonstrating how many different developments a presence of this type can have in the area.

A precedent also in Brindisi

Until a year ago, among other things, Brindisi also had a reuse centre, the presence of which, however, is not part of the tender specifications for the reuse service. urban hygiene. And that in addition to offering the service itself, i.e. collecting the material and making it available to other people, also through specific posts on the Facebook page, it was an integral part of the communication and “education” strategy dedicated especially to younger people. With various initiatives on waste separation in schools and creative recycling workshops even on the beaches, during the summer period. Since the urban hygiene service passed from Ecotecnica to Avr per l’Ambiente (a company that was initially called Teorema), however, the reuse center – which was located in the operational headquarters of the previous manager – has closed its doors. Also because for the first few months in Brindisi Teorema/Avr had to face considerable problems with its operational headquarters, having failed to find the necessary spaces. For this reason, among other things, it had to ask the Municipality to be able to rely, at least temporarily, in a publicly owned space. Which caused accusations from part of the opposition, with several councilors questioning how the availability of an area at the time of submitting the application to participate in the trying was one of the requirements to participate. After a few months of waiting and quite a bit of controversy, however, Avr has found its own home.

A new tender document

But, despite this, the reuse center never started again. As mentioned, in fact, it was not part of the tender specifications which were the basis of the tender in which the company participated. And in fact the predecessor of the current manager, Ecotecnica, had opened the center as an additional service. This means that to make sense of what the Municipality is planning, the center will have to be included in the next contract, which after years of waiting should probably be the ten-year one and not the two-year one. In fact, in recent months the Municipality of Brindisi participated in the first “call for proposal” of the cross-border cooperation program “Interreg VI-A Greece-Italy 2021/2027” by applying as leader the “Re-use” project, to which the Municipalities of Matera, Arta and Patras joined as partners. Last September 9th, the first call for “Phase B” of the ordinary projects of the Interreg Program was published, the deadline for which is set for tomorrow. The Program Management Authority, for its part, had informed the Municipality of Brindisi on 10 September that the “Re-use” project had successfully passed the first evaluation phase and had been admitted to the subsequent one. Precisely for this reason, in recent days the council has given the green light to the resolution approving the technical-economic feasibility project (the first of the three design levels) relating to the reuse centre, with all the attached documentation, timetable and graphic tables included, and your candidacy for the call for “Phase B” of the Interreg Program is established.