On World Environment Day, ECOTIC invited its producers at Ateliere Fara Frontiere, for the Open Doors Day for WEEE Recycling
The day of June 5th, the date the UN has established as World Environment Day, marked a special event: ECOTIC and Ateliere Fara Frontiere opened the doors and made a demonstration of the complexity of WEEE recycling fluxes in front of the invited producers.
In its 9 years of activity, ECOTIC has managed to set up a functional and efficient system for collecting, recycling and reusing WEEE, a system that involves EEE producers and importers, designated operators for various stages in the recycling and revaluation process as well as the general audience. It doesn’t always mean that participants in this system know or interact with each other directly. That is why ECOTIC engages in actions that offer opportunities for people to meet, know each other, in an attempt to create trust, synergy and increased efficiency.
The World Environment Day offered a perfect opportunity to organize the Open Doors Day for WEEE Recycling, an annual event that is becoming traditional. If last year ECOTIC had invited producers to Buzau, this year the event was hosted by Ateliere Fara Frontiere, an operator for IT recycling and valuation and a special partner of ECOTIC. For the past 5 years, AFF has not only collected and recycled a wide variety of IT equipment, but has managed to translate in Romania a concept that is becoming ever more powerful in Europe and elsewhere: the circular, social and solidary economy.
In short, as a consequence of its partnership with ECOTIC, AFF manages to professionalize and create jobs for people in difficulty – men and women with moving life stories. These are people who manage to learn a trade and put together everything that the correct recycling of WEEE means: disassembly, valuation, creative reuse and longer life span. At the same time, the partnership between ECOTIC and AFF created the basis for a very important outcome connected to WEEE recycling: the reuse of this type of waste. Thus, much of such equipment in the recycling flux are tested, improved and given back to the public through projects that are meant to sustain impoverished communities or organizations that need help in closing the huge technological gap between communities.
ECOTIC’s partners had the chance to see all these aspects directly, inside AFF’s workshops. It is the kind of experience that creates connections and generates a big amount of energy for the work we all do, for the same purpose: a clean environment.
