Author: Ella Davidson (Demos), Editted by: Beatriz Martínez (UPM)
How can cities transform a harmful situation into a useful project involving citizens?
Applause is a project led by the city of Ljubljana, Slovenia aiming to find solutions to invasive alien plant species (IAPS) in cities. Ljubljana is applying a zero-waste and circular economy principle to deal with these harmful plant species.
Ljubljana is moving from a linear model for managing IAPS to a circular one that is valuable for the entire ecosystem. This process involves six steps: plant identification, biomass harvest, processing & storage, value recovery, final production, and new products & services to market.
Through a variety of educational and awareness-raising actions, citizens are encouraged to participate in different stages of the Applause circular model. To do so, Ljubljana implements a participatory model that adapts to the needs and interests of different target groups.
Applause draws awareness to the more unknown issue of IAPS. IAPS are detrimental to native biodiversity and can harm people’s health depending on the species. Instead of getting rid of these species, the project reuses materials that would otherwise be incinerated, using innovative approaches to create new materials out of it.
- Democratised decision-making & distributed agency
- Collective learning ability
- Collaborative action ability
The city recognises that in order to achieve climate neutrality people need to be involved and educated in the process to become invested. Through a participatory model, the project engages the public in the decision making process of how to deal with IAPS. They have also given the public three options on how to deal with them by either doing it by themselves and learning through educational materials, removing species together and learning in public workshops or leaving species at a collection point.
An innovative approach
Applause identified the IAPS as a problem for the town, creating a decline in native biodiversity, environmental damage and potentially human health. Instead of continuing to incinerate or compost these plants, they have instead identified new ways to use the species through means such as plant processing to make paper, pest control, food, dyes, and hybrid coatings. To do this they are testing unconventional processes and techniques to process plants to paper and other products. For example, testing the concept of using waste liquid from IAPS in production of paper into raw materials for industrial purposes.
To identify IAPS, new approaches have been made to be more time efficient through the use of aerial and satellite imaging. The data that has been collected is on an open platform so many can contribute and also learn from the data.
In processing IAPS, Applause has put people's engagement at the center of the approach, highlighting the importance of engagement to create change. They have collaborated with universities, students, and citizens to take part in this zero-waste approach where people are gathering and creating new materials together. To engage citizens they have held 143 workshops with 2980 participants, 29 educational events, 3 festivals, posted 20 educational videos etc. to ensure that there is effective communication and engagement with the public and to raise awareness at different engagement levels.
Main positive lessons
- Zero-waste + circular economy concepts were able to be applied to IAPS that would have otherwise been incinerated, creating a new purpose that is of use to the citizens who participated
- Centering citizens as the core stakeholders/audience of the project meant that they were educated about the issue and were able to get involved too
- Used a variety of educational tools to build awareness (such as, festivals, workshops, videos) on an often ignored issue
Main barriers found
- Participation in the harvesting phase of the six step process was less than hoped for
Potential for reapplication and scale-up
The overall idea of the project can be used in other contexts, especially using citizen participation as a key part of the process. Raising awareness and using educational techniques should be fairly easy to transfer to other contexts.
This would most likely need to be used in a smaller community context rather than larger city based projects to ensure increased participation and the ability to provide educational support.
There would be a need to identify if an area needs/has significant issues with IAPS and if it does then they would need to adapt the plan to what IAPS there are. This would also mean that there would need to be research into whether the local IAPS can be similarly adapted/processed to create new products, perhaps with collaboration with local universities or research institutes.
Photos and videos extracted from Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/es) and from the city of Ljubljana webpage