Since 2016 there has been a project partnership with the El Guettar community in Tunisia as part of the ‘Germany-North Africa Municipal Knowledge Transfer’ GIZ project. This involved launching a public awareness campaign for the separate collection of waste, supporting self-composting and initiating the building of recycling centres for separate collections of plastic materials, paper and cardboard boxes, as well as metals. The recycling centre was opened in December 2019. The next project involves building a composting site for bio-waste and green materials. This nationwide pilot project will be further supported and rolled out as widely as possible.
As one of the few municipal waste disposal companies in the district, we’ve been operating within the philosophy of performing all possible tasks involved in modern waste management on our own for over 25 years now. We always have a clear hierarchy of objectives in mind: preventing waste – preparing for reuse – recovering materials – recovering energy – disposal. We have also exceeded the recycling quotas set by the EU Waste Framework Directive for years now, as well as the Baden-Württemberg state targets for 2020, with the help of our waste management concept. In state-of-the-art facilities, including a fermentation plant and a residual waste-to-energy plant, in which the district has a 50% stake, and through recovering landfill gas, we turn our waste into electricity and heating.