How the tiny Greek island of Tilos is throwing out the concept of waste

A Tilos resident with her Polygreen bag for recyclables. @polygreen/handout via REUTERS

For Athanasios Polychronopoulos, founder and chairman of Greece-based circular economy specialist Polygreen, the word “waste” is an anathema.

“The existing waste model is a cancer to our society. I'm using this word deliberately," he says. "In 10 or 15 years’ time we’ll look back at what we did and ask: why did we throw (away) all these valuable materials?”

His company has just implemented a zero-waste project on the tiny Greek island of Tilos, and is looking to prove that it can scale in the United Arab Emirates, which is aiming for zero waste by 2030. Polygreen took away all public bins on Tilos and painstakingly showed households and businesses how to sort their waste into recyclables, organic waste and non-recyclables. An app provides feedback on how much each household has produced and whether they’ve put materials into the correct bins.

This programme of behavioural change has produced dividends: over the course of the past year, the 745 residents of the Aegean island have reduced their waste by almost 40%, compared with what they produced before Polygreen arrived. Just 12.6% of it is non-recyclable, but Polygreen wants to get that down further, to 5%.

At the local recycling centre, materials are sorted into 25 streams – so well sorted and compressed that they have a value. The islanders benefit from free compost made from their organic waste, while the non-recyclable materials, such as used toilet roll and disposable nappies, get dried and shredded to become fuel for cement kilns. In Greece, this is the only industry licensed to receive such treated waste, and is obliged to filter pollutants before they reach the atmosphere.

Polygreen workers carry out the daily collection of recyclables on the tiny Greek island. @polygreen/Handout via Reuters

Polychronopoulos attributes the success of the initiative to three factors: “If you give them (the islanders) a service with respect, they respect you. If you are consistent, they will believe in you. If you are transparent, they will become your allies.”

The big question is whether his model can work on a bigger scale. The first step is to take the initiative to some 150,000 people in a district of Abu Dhabi. Polygreen plans to train locals, who will in turn train households, drawing on management expertise from the international business school Insead, and even on virtual reality.

Household bins will be weighed, and again citizens will get data via an app. “We'll slowly educate people to produce less waste, to produce better recyclables and then, through the app, we’ll also introduce them to products that are reusable,” says Polychronopoulos.

He’s discussing potential measures with the government that could support its activities, such as increasing landfill taxes and fines for dumping waste.

Atalay Atasu, a circular economy specialist at Insead, is working with the company to investigate scale-up from a situation where Polygreen can talk to households individually and build relationships, to one where that’s impossible.

“There are many layers to the plastics waste problem. What this company is doing is attacking it at the source to change consumer behaviour,” says Atasu. “The consumer has to be part of the solution.”

That doesn’t mean businesses don’t have a responsibility to redesign their products and to build recycling infrastructure, but “you need to find a way to create incentives for consumers to reduce waste and to sort waste properly, so that efficient processing can happen and you maximise recovery rates so you retain value in a circular system”. The other issue is who pays for the reduction in quantities of waste?

What it takes for the Polygreen business model to make economic sense, however, is an open question. “I would like to see this business model become economically viable everywhere,” says Atasu. “It’s better for the environment.”

Link: How the tiny Greek island of Tilos is throwing out the concept of waste | Reuters