Cleaning-up Serbia: Designing and Delivering a Public Campaign with over 200,000 volunteers

Objectives

In Serbia’s urban areas, approximately 1kg of waste is generated per person a day, and a bit less in rural areas. While this is well under the European average poor waste management and a lack of environmental awareness is a major problem in Serbia. Ten years of regional conflicts and international isolation during the 1990s resulted in a serious decline of the Serbian economy and, as so often happens, an overall deterioration in environmental protection. The democratic reforms from 2000 onwards helped improve the situation somewhat. 

However up until 2009 serbia was faced with numerous environmental issues that included

• there being 4,481 illegal dumping sites

• Public Utility Companies were poorly equipped

• there was no recycling system in place at all

• less that 60% of the population was covered by organised waste collection

• the lack of a robust legal framework

• bad habits of citizens in dealing with their waste means that this problem hasn’t gone away.

In 2009 new environmental legislation was adopted, which devolved significant waste management authority from central to local level. However, local authorities had insufficient capacity to carry out their new responsibilities. This raised the question of how the legislation could be implemented throughout Serbia.

In order to overcome this obstacle, the Ministry of Environmental Protection, Mining and Spatial Planning decided to launch a public campaign called ’Clean Serbia’.

The campaign was launched to:

• help reduce pollution

• increase the capacities of the recycling industry

• eradicate bad habits and raise awareness of the population on environmental issues.

The campaign was funded from the Environmental Protection Fund established by the Government of Serbia. This Fund has allocated over RSD 800 million for co-financing numerous projects at central and local government levels to help remove illegal dumps and support public utility companies in purchasing automated garbage trucks, trash bins and other required equipment.

The overall objective of the initiative in the National Strategy for Waste Management adopted by the Government in Serbia in 2010 was to increase the percentage of organised waste collection from 60% (in 2009) to 75 % by the end of 2014.

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