Banská Bystrica is the second county city where special red and white containers are placed for sorting and collecting, especially small electrical appliances, such as hair dryers, mixers, cell phones, batteries and accumulators.

“Having a clean and healthy city is important to us. That’s why I am happy that 20 red-and-white containers will be placed around Banská Bystrica to allow the people of Banská Bystrica to comfortably sort any unnecessary electrical waste. Their advantage is that they are available to the public at any time and have no opening hours such compared to collecting yards,” said Mayor Jan Nosko.

The unique network of red-and-white containers built by producer responsibility organisation ASEKOL SK since 2016 has thus expanded to the sixth city. “In 2018 these red and white containers can be used by more than 200,000 inhabitants” as said by Ronald Blaho, Executive officer of ASEKOL SK, and he added: “In the past year and a half, we managed to collect more than 16 tons of small electrical appliances through our red and white containers. This is very good news for the environment.”

In order to improve the sorted waste collection and increase recycling in general, it is necessary to constantly come up with solutions for items such as small electrical devices collection of which is complicated and demanding. During the preparation of the project, we also cooperated with d2B, which is active in the field of information technology for waste management.

The collection of electrical waste and used batteries and accumulators is funded by contributions from manufacturers placing electrical appliances, electrical equipment, batteries and accumulators on the market. Producers are subject to the principle of extended liability according to the Waste Act (79/2015 Coll. on Waste), which means that the producers are responsible for handling products from their production even after the end of their life cycle, i.e. in the phase of electrical waste, or used batteries and accumulators. Manufacturers of electrical equipment, batteries and accumulators are required to ensure compliance with the specified collection, recovery and recycling limits, which increase annually.