January 30, 2022 - The lack of the habit of sorting garbage is one of the biggest problems regarding waste in the Croatian capital, which is why the city of Zagreb will build a sorting plant in Žitnjak.

The waste sorting plant in Žitnjak is planned to be completed in two years and will swallow 120,000 tons of waste per year, which will be sorted by size, color, ballistic and magnetic properties, reports Jutarnji List.

The Center for Waste Management (ZCGO), which is the project holder, informed that Zagreb will build a sorting plant worth 392 million kuna, which will be able to swallow as much as 120,000 tons of waste a year, could be built by the end of this or the beginning of next year.

It has ready-made documentation, clean land of the bankrupt Dioki of almost 100,000 square meters, a location permit, and in the summer, after obtaining a building permit, a public procurement for contractors should follow. The planned construction period is two years, and until then the most important thing is for citizens to adopt the habit of separating waste in their households.

Plastic in yellow bags, biological waste in brown bags, and mixed, as announced, in official city bags of 4 or 8 kuna. By the way, only 17 percent of Zagreb residents now sort waste. Igor Zgomba, the director of ZCGO, tried to vividly explain that Zagreb will finally have a plant that will be able to receive, purify, dispose of, and even place 120,000 tons of dry recycle on the market.

The Zagreb sorting plant is the first step. It will receive about 120,000 tons of yellow bags, ie the already separated so-called dry recycling - plastic, paper, cardboard, metal, and glass - which will be further separated in the 16,500 square meter plant and finally sold on the market as pure recycled (although it can never be completely clean).

So, when the citizens of Zagreb separate their waste on the doorstep - plastic, paper and metal into yellow, or biowaste into brown bins and mixed waste into, as announced, official city bags - the contents of the yellow bins will go to the sorting plant. Once again, finely sorted, this waste will come out in the form of paper, plastic, metal or glass cubes of several tons. According to Zgomba, a little more than 80 percent of the total amount of waste entering the plant can come out of the sorting plant in a highly purified form.

For more, check out our lifestyle section.