EU Environment Ministers on an excursion to Saubermacher

A guided tour of the high-tech sorting plant for lightweight packaging materials was accompanied by a presentation by the Saubermacher team of its treatment plant for lithium-ion batteries, its ‘wastebox’ online platform and its latest Smart Waste projects, including intelligent refuse containers, all developed in-house.

Mission Possible.

Under conditions of very tight security, this trip to Graz by the EU Environ-ment Ministers and their delegations included a visit to Saubermacher’s operational site on Puchstrasse. The focal point of the company presentation was its contribution to achievement of the objectives of the EU Life-Cycle Resource Management package. Ralf Mittermayr, CEO and Board of Management spokesperson of Saubermacher AG phrased it like this: “We are on a good path, one involving the raising of public awareness to achieve accurate segregation of waste materials through transparency and direct communication with local residents, achiev-ing reductions in CO2 emissions through smart logistics and innovative business models and through accomplishing higher proportions of recycled materials and new processing plants for Future Waste”. “Recycling management is not an abstract concept. Valuable resources should be used responsibly and efficiently. Today’s correctly separated waste can thus become to-morrow’s raw materials. This affects us all – each and every one of us can make a valuable contribution. Saubermacher are leading the way in waste management right across Europe, and as Environment Minister, I am delighted to be acknowledging the achievements of this kind of company in the context of the informal Environment Council,” said Minister for Sustain-ability and Tourism Elisabeth Köstinger.

Let’s do it together.

This company views it as a civic responsibility to work towards an envi-ronment fit for life, and is committed to the EU’s environmental objectives. With its vision of Zero Waste, the company is actually going one step further and is pursuing the goal of leaving no waste behind whatsoever. The idea being to process all waste materials in such a way that they can be managed within a (virtually infinite) cycle. “Together, we can master the chal-lenges”, stated Hans Roth, the founder and Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Sauber-macher AG, convinced that the Life-Cycle Resource Management package is achievable. From a Saubermacher perspective, collaboration between public and private sectors has an important role to play here. With 21 Public Private Partnerships in Central Europe (including with the city of Graz), the company is also leading the way in this field.