In the Tampere urban region, there are reuse centers in, among other places, Nekala, Lielahti, and the newest arrival in the Lentola business cluster. The goal of all of them is to promote reuse and support employment. The reuse centers have strong cooperation in marketing and promoting reuse. I have had a great opportunity to be part of developing the activities.
At the end of 2021, there was discussion about the effectiveness, importance, and measurability of the reuse centers' environmental work. We are the workhorses of reuse activities, but we have, for our part, lacked information about the effectiveness of our activities in the light of concrete figures.
Mainly, there was a need to determine the percentages and kilos of materials arriving at the association as donations that go to reuse, recycling, and energy recovery. Likewise, we previously lacked the tools to calculate the carbon footprint of our activities and to express the carbon handprint of our activities as concrete figures.
Now the stars were aligned. How chance struck just the right spot. At the end of 2021, the recycling center received a message that environmental sector student Ella Miettinen was applying for a position to complete the specialist vocational qualification in the environmental sector and resource efficiency.
Ella, the bright spot of our community, was chosen as the project manager of the Tavaravirtaa ja ympäristösäästöjä 2022 project, working in an environmental expert role on the project. Thanks to the project, we now have plenty of documentation on circular economy trends, the reuse market situation, legislation, reuse, recycling, and energy recovery of materials.
The association now has a tested and functional model for tracking and analyzing material flows, as well as a model for calculating the carbon handprint and assessing the carbon footprint.
The Waste Act and cooperation with authorities increasingly require describing our activities in concrete figures. Likewise, in our internal and external communications to all stakeholders, we can provide concrete figures about our activities. We can now also strengthen our responsibility communications by concretely describing our environmentally friendly activities.
Ella has nicely highlighted the steering mechanisms of the circular economy during the project. These include the Waste Act & Valtsu (the national waste plan), producer responsibilities, various action programs and projects, political will, environmental labels, sustainable development goals, the goals of the EU, the state, the municipality, and legislation, steering mechanisms and methods, innovations, resource efficiency, measures to preserve biodiversity, and to replace fossil fuels.
Ella has held workshops, actively presented the progress and outputs of the project to the staff, set up a circular economy blog, and produced valuable environmentally themed material for our organization's use. Ella has brought joy to everyday life in our community and useful professional knowledge about environmental matters.
Together we want to congratulate Ella on completing the qualification and on our good cooperation on this shared journey. Thank you, Ella, and congratulations on completing the specialist vocational qualification! We hope to cooperate in the future as well.