CORA BARTOLO
I’ll be brief this time… This week was also jam packed with activities. I began the week by taking a train to Slovenia to attend two meetings in the capital city, Ljubljana. To my eyes, Slovenia is a smaller, quainter, quieter, village-structured country. It boarders Italy on the west and in my imagination it resembles that country and its culture somewhat.
Our first meeting was at an engineering company that designs small-scale waste water treatment plants. The can be for a single home – 4 p.e. or a small village community at 150 p.e.. These small plants have a primary settling tank, an aeration zone, and secondary treatment plant equipped with its own biological treatment. In Slovenia (member of the EU), septic tanks have been banned in most circumstances. The government ran a tax incentive program to encourage the transfer to these types of systems. We learned though, that many “off brands” if you will, are being constructed and are likely not meeting specifications. You can find out about the design of these plants at www.hidroinzeniring.si
The real excitement came for me when we visited a company called Limnos. They do constructed wetlands and other types of eco-remediation, primarily in Slovenia, but in other areas of Europe as well. Their website is available in English and I highly recommend that you visit it. They can be accessed at http://www.limnos.si/eng/index.php . They indicate to me that these wetland/eco-remediation sites have approved standards that have been approved by the EU to treat many types of water including landfill leachate, municipal sewage, and agricultural run-off. They can also construct systems that remediate what we call brownfield sites. My dream has come true – do they have a job opening ???
Later in the week I attended the regional eco-tourism conference hosted by the ISRBC, managed by a regional NGO (The Croatian division of the Regional Environmental Center – REC) and financially supported by the US Embassy to Croatia (economic department). The ISRBC is the first form of transboundary cooperation between these countries of the former Yugoslavia. As you know, these countries (except Slovenia) also engaged in a war for many years. There is still evidence of war and tension in the people and the buildings, however I will write about this at another time. The ISRBC offers hope that these countries can work together and begin peace through cooperation and potentially through transboundary eco-tourism. I don’t want to give the impression that there is hatred and present conflict, because there is not; however, one can sense hesitation and trepidation between these neighbors.
If you don’t know anything about this area of the world, treat yourself to a few Google searches.