SITA CZ a.s.

04.11.2011 - Kateřina Kodadová

Praha 24.10.2011 – SITA Slovensko is No. 1 in the EnviroČin category and holds Enviro Oscar in the Slovak National Enviro Competion 2011. This competition was held in Slovakia for the fourth time. SITA Slovensko, being the winner of the category, may use a green smiley symbol.
The competition was opened within the 38th International Film Festival - Ekotopfilm (17 - 21 September 2011 in Bratislava) which focused on sustainable development. After the end of the festival, films are shown traditionally in Košice, Trenčín, Žilina, Banská Bystrica, Trnava, Prešov and Prague. During a special evening event on Saturday, 22 October 2011, the Slovak Minister of Environment József Nagy handed in the prize to SITA – to the hands of Jiří Kovář who manages the Slovakia Division.

SITA's EnviroČin
Jana Nékyová, marketing expert in SITA Slovensko: "For competition, I chose "environmentally clean records" on behalf of SITA Slovakia. We added this term into the language during the year 2008 together with Igor Svítok, the commissioner for Slovak records. The record is environmentally clean because it was reached using secondary raw materials sorted out from typical communal household waste which are not normally sorted out or are separated little only. Then, something nice for people's eye is created. We have got two records: The first one is a record-size picture from plastics on a square in Banská Bystrica - we worked there together with grammar school. And the second record is the Bažant Pohoda festival where record quantities of wastes were sorted out".

When the environmentally clean records were created?
Bažant Pohoda Festival

This was the fourth time for SITA Slovensko to clean and sort out wastes in the Bažant Pohoda Festival in Trenčín.
This is the first music festival in Slovakia where wastes are sorted out. Festival visitors sort out plastic, paper and metal.
Each visitor receives one bag for waste plastic which occurs most often there and another bag for other wastes. SITA Slovensko teams collect then full bags. Bags are freely available during the festival not only to visitors, but also to those who sell there food and beverages or other goods.

On the site, there are containers for plastic, paper, metal and mixed wastes. This year, BRO bins (for bio-degradable wastes) and bins for edible fat and oil appeared there for the first time. The sorted out and mixed wastes are regularly removed from the festival site. In each container, there is a big colour label with information about the waste type to be placed there. The labels are prepared in cooperation with the festival partner - ENVI-PAK.

SITA Slovensko is also responsible for final cleaning of the site. This year, the festival preview team published on its web site the following comment:
" Bažant Pohoda 2011 was given nine out of ten point on Virtualfestivals.com which ranks among most popular festival guides. Such a high score was given, in addition to us, to another four summer festivals (Isle of Wight and Sonisphere in UK, Hellfest in France and Roskilde in Danemark). Clean, friendly, cheap and Pohoda is a west Europe festival for east Europe prices which this year, after 15 years, stood up for itself against the best we've got. Pohoda 2012 is worthy of serious consideration,"Jon Wright says there.

And to motivate the festival visitors to collect wastes separately, last year we tried to make a new record - most plastic sorted out during a single event. And we succeeded this year.

Envirofilm Festival

Last year SITA Slovensko, a.s. continued the festive ride with its environmentally clean records. In 2010 we asked all grammar schools in towns which hosted the festival to join our project: Let us create a record chain. It took two months for children from 19 grammar schools in Banská Bystrica, Zvolen, Banská Štiavnica, Kremnica and Krupina to collect pure alumina caps mostly from milk packages. They used chain links made from the caps to create two meter chains, the final length of the chain being 2,250 m.

In 2011, SITA Slovensko was the general partner for the Envirofilm festival. Our goal was to teach the children to separate plastic packages for yoghurt or milk products. Thanks to enormous efforts of the children, we have manage to create on the SNP Square in Banská Bystrica a record logo of the Envirofilm Festival which turned out to be a new Slovak record. The size of the picture made from recyclable plastic was 51.59 m2.

The children were collecting waste plastics for three months. We contacted not only grammar schools in towns where Envirofilm took place in May but also in Sereď, Levice and Sliač. 7,996 pupils out of 22 grammar schools collected the wastes for the record project. We together managed to collect 1,200 kg plastic packages (cca. 370,000 were cca. 43 m3 pots). We took them from the schools, separated the plastic pots and used them for the record. At the same time, we collected PET bottles from schools.

But we do not focus on making records only. During the waste collection we are cooperating and communicating with teachers in the participating schools. We are trying to guide the children jointly to behave in an environmental friendly way. This year, we were teaching the children to use little water only to wash their pots or to use service water only. The children had also a chance to collect alumina foil from milk products which we took over from them. Not every town has got containers for metal packages for its people. We were trying to teach the children to product as little waste as possible.

The children will then start being aware, through this a game-like form, of the waste and submit their own suggestions what could be separated out of solid communal wastes and re-used/recycled. The teachers often tell us that this shapes the character of the children positively. During the past two years, the schools were organising several additional events to support the record project: ecology days, decoration of the schools with pot chains, or creation of various pictures from the pots.

Because all activities are closely connected with ecology, the winning schools received corresponding prizes: The three best schools received this year for all their classes bins for separated wastes. The proof for waste harvesting within the record project in the schools is that both the teachers and children want us to continue the project.

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