The winners of the Green Steps contest – representatives of small businesses and social entrepreneurs from the Baikal region – have already started implementing their green projects, and in the meantime we have launched a series of educational webinars about greening for grantee teams.
The first webinar was attended by experts Jochen Ebbing, waste recycling specialist and MANEB participant, and Ekaterina Kuznetsova, General Director of Green Office LLC.
Jochen Ebbing shared his experience in collecting and processing clothes in Germany. This topic is especially interesting for two of our winners: charity stores «Vtornik» (eng. «Tuesday») from Irkutsk and «Nitochka» (eng. «Thread») from Ulan-Ude. On average, every German resident gets rid of 15 kilograms of clothing per year, and almost 100% of this volume ends up in special containers for textiles serviced by commercial companies. Since most things are handed over by consumers in good condition, 60% of their number goes for resale, 45% – for recycling for secondary use, and only 5% is third-party garbage that is transferred to incineration. As the director of the Thread project Evgenia Alekseeva noted, in Russia the percentage of illiquid waste in clothing containers is still much higher.
Ekaterina Kuznetsova covered in detail the topic of green certification for real estate, including hotels, offices and restaurants. In addition to foreign certification systems, for example, LEED and BREEAM, domestic companies have the opportunity to apply Russian standards Ecogreenoffice, Ecogreenhotel, which are adapted to the specifics of the legislation of the Russian Federation and help to start doing business environmentally friendly at the design and construction stage of the building. This information was especially useful for the teams of two hotels and a restaurant from Ulan-Ude, which are already implementing their projects on waste minimization and environmental education with the support of grants from the Foundation.
The recording of the first educational webinar can be viewed below, as well as via the link.
During the year we are holding two more online events for entrepreneurs of the Baikal region. We hope that such a mini-accelerator will help them to dive even deeper into the principles of eco-friendly business and, of course, to implement them!