Cascais is a Coastal city of more than 200.000 inhabitants in the outskirts of the Lisbon Metropolitan Region. It also has a striving tourist industry which leads to the valorisation of the unique landscape and cultural heritage. EMAC – Cascais Ambiente is the municipal company responsible for environmental management on behalf of the Municipality of Cascais. Its mission is to contribute to the sustainable development of the Cascais municipality and improve the quality of life of its residents and visitors, assuming itself as a reference in the community.
Cascais has officially approved its Carbon Neutrality Roadmap 2050, following Portugal’s signature of the Paris Agreement and its national roadmap presented in 2019. To promote our carbon neutrality goals and to reach European recycling goals, Cascais must improve the recycling rate of households by promoting sustainable consumption to favour a circular economy as well as the reduction of waste in landfill.
Cascais aims to increase waste streams for recycling purposes including biowaste, textile and others with recycling potential. This is particularly useful in door-to-door collection services or waste tracking to ensure the collected waste is properly channelled to build new products. This is also complementary to the support we can give services (such as restaurants or the tourism sector) to transform their management procedures to reduce waste production and to engage their clients in the process.
Cascais needs a data collection system able to monitor and manage textile selective waste streams. The use of IT platforms, data and digital solutions can help us to better understand the usage patterns and allow an increase of awareness and education of citizens and local actors (also through gamification). On the other hand, Cascais intends to increase the quality of the waste collected by improving the selective waste collection processes as well as the potential to foster local textile recycling.
To this end, the city is looking for a solution supporting (i) to increase knowledge and awareness of the impact of textile waste and the potential opportunities for recycling and reuse, (ii) to support the circular economy strategy also through cross collaboration with citizens, local organizations, NGO’s and waste collection companies, (iii) to promote public awareness and dissemination events with stakeholders and new innovative circular solutions and (iv) to gather data to identify gaps and the opportunities arising from the different moments and actors involved in textiles life cycle.
To this end, CLIMABOROUGH supports the City on its innovative public procurement process that will start on July 12.
To have more information about the Cascais challenge, you can read the dedicated section.
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