The Councillor for the Environment and Territory, Miquel Mir, the Director-General of Waste and Environmental Education, Sebastià Sansó, and the Director of the Office of Planning and Coordination of Strategic Investments, Joan Carrió, presented this Friday the call for grants to support the implementation of waste regulations and the promotion of the circular economy in the Balearic Islands financed by the European Union-Next Generation EU.

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The call is endowed with 15.6 million euros from the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan and is aimed at financing actions to move towards a change of model in waste management. The beneficiaries will be island councils, town councils, associations of municipalities, waste consortiums or waste managers holding concessions for publicly-owned facilities.

The rules of the call will be published this coming Saturday in the Official Gazette of the Balearic Islands (BOIB). The beneficiaries will have one month to present the projects that aspire to the subsidy.

Mir stressed that “never before have so many resources been allocated to finance waste management policies in the archipelago” and pointed out that this is, in part, thanks to the fact that the call takes into account the floating population when distributing funds between autonomous communities. “In this way, for the first time, the Balearic Islands has been compensated for the weight of tourists in the generation of waste, a historical demand of this government,” he said.

Eligible projects must coincide with one of these four lines which, in turn, are divided into several sub-lines:

• Implementation of a new separate collection of bio-waste, and improvement of existing ones.
• Construction of specific facilities for the treatment of separately collected bio-waste.
• Construction of new facilities for the preparation for re-use and recycling of other separately collected waste streams.
• Investments in collection facilities (such as clean points), waste sorting and classification and improvement of existing mechanical-biological treatment plants.

The director-general pointed out that “promoting innovation and the renovation of facilities is one of the priorities of the Regional Ministry since in order to change the model we need all the agents involved in the waste management cycle”. Sansó added that “we have adopted the call for proposals so that it is also fair between the islands, which is why the distribution of funds takes into account the needs of each island to deal with waste management and distribution percentages are established for each of the islands”.

Thus, the 15,559,303.39 € of the call will be distributed between 2022 and 2024 according to the following territorial criteria, in accordance with Law 3/2014, of 17 June, of the system of definitive financing of the island councils, whereby the proportion imputed to Mallorca is 74.67%; to Eivissa, 12.85%; to Menorca 11.13% and to Formentera 1.36%.

For his part, Carrió explained that the amount earmarked to finance this aid for the implementation of waste regulations is part of the 34.5 million euros that have already been formally allocated to the Conselleria de Medi Ambient i Territori from the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Mechanism, one of the channels that make up the Next Generation programme. “We anticipate that in the coming month agreements will be formalised with the central government to add a further 8 million euros, bringing the total to 42.6 million,” he said.