The Kneževac Recycling Centre was founded in 1966, as an enterprise for the bulk collection of secondary raw materials. Miteco revived this old plant through a brownfield investment, giving it new purpose and creating a representative European centre for the management of hazardous and non-hazardous waste
Serbia is a very specific market for doing business and it is primarily essential to understand how it functions in order to make the right investment decisions, explains Miteco president Miodrag Mitrović, emphasising that Miteco financed all investments from its profits, and in so doing carefully selected areas for investment.
Apart from recycling electrical machines, environmental remediation and the disposal of hazardous waste, what else does your company deal with today?
Miteco is a modern European centre that provides an holistic approach to the management of flows of hazardous and non-hazardous waste and has several separate units, and our plant for the reconditioning of metal and plastic packaging should become operational soon.
This represents a completely new service on our market that will aim to restore packaging for reuse. The technology itself was imported from Italy and is based on the principles of the circular economy, with water used to cleanse packaging of chemical residues, but without that water and chemical residues being released into the environment, rather the entire process is performed within a closed system.
There is an expectation for your company to be different and innovative. Does this mean that you have to find new integral and sustainable solutions for protecting the environment?
Technological procedures for managing waste are changing both around the world and in our country, and are changing in such a way that it makes economic sense. That’s precisely why it’s necessary to listen to the needs of the market and adjust one’s services to meet demand. For example, removing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from the environment and conducting soil remediation are things that we will have to work on a lot in the period ahead.
This year we’re celebrating the coming-of-age of the Miteco forum, as an informative educational platform
Miteco is implementing a project that we’ve contracted with UNIDO and which is funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and relates to the removal of PCBs from the environment in Serbia. This is an innovative procedure that we’ve developed with the Nikola Tesla Electrical Engineering Institute and that will become a reference for the future removal of PCBs in Serbia.
Serbia is a very specific market for doing business. For example, it is not commonplace here to replace or renew energy equipment after the expiry of its depreciation period, but rather the energy system uses very old devices. This results in energy efficiency being extremely low, which is not the case in many European countries.
The VI Miteco Forum will be held again this year, as has become a tradition. What will it address?
With our belief in the importance of exchanging information, ideas and knowhow, we will organise the 6th International Miteco Forum at Belgrade’s Hilton Hotel on 26th November. Under the slogan “I know, so I can”, our idea is to gather together experts from various fields in order to reach new knowledge and conclusions that can further represent important guidelines for creating an improved social, economic and ecological environment. We could say that we are celebrating the coming of age of the Miteco Forum this year, while we will also be presenting ideas about the directions in which this informative-educational platform could develop further.