Lipor – Intermunicipal Waste Management Service of Greater Porto

Lipor is the entity responsible for the management, valorisation, and treatment of municipal solid waste produced by its eight associated municipalities: Espinho, Gondomar, Maia, Matosinhos, Porto, Póvoa de Varzim, Valongo and Vila do Conde. Lipor has come to implement an integrated management of waste, extending and building infrastructures complemented by awareness campaigns for the general public.

Integrated Treatment and Valorisation Strategy of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW)

Lipor treats around 500 thousand tons of municipal solid waste produced by 1 million inhabitants every year. Sustaining modern MSW management concepts such as the adoption of integrated system and minimising disposal in landfill, Lipor developed an integrated treatment, valorisation and confinement strategy for MSW based in three main components: Multimaterial Valorisation, Organic Valorisation and Energy Recovery – complemented by a sanitary landfill for the disposal of rejected waste and previously prepared residues.

As President of the BioWaste Cluster, set up by ACR+ in the framework of its “-100kg campaign”, Lipor has gained a broad knowledge and information on biowaste reduction techniques.

On local level, around 40% of the waste produced in Lipor’s Municipalities is organic waste.
Part of this waste could be composted at the source in households, buildings and schools with garden. The home composting process could reduce at least 300 kg/y for each household.

Many people would like to compost but do not have garden or yard to do it. The composting in apartments using electrical composting machine is an innovative action and LIPOR intends to benefit from the opportunity of the LIFE + project to demonstrate the main interests to develop this technique in Europe by mastering its use.

At the moment, the following actions have already been implemented at LIPOR’s Area and will be developed and optimized during the Life+ project.
Home composting monitoring,
Hands-on courses on composting and biological gardening related issues,
Hands-on courses on cooking and food waste reduction,
School and community composting.

Lipor also started on-site research actions in order to estimate the amount of CO2 emissions avoided by composting (see study “From Waste to CO2 – Home Composting and Greenhouse Gases Emissions”, Evalue, 2008) and will share its expertise on this field with the other partners during the MINIWASTE project.

Objectives of Lipor

Summary of Ana Lopes’ speech.

“Within the framework of its organic waste management, the city of Porto distribute free individuals compost bins to its inhabitants, including, since recently, electric compost bins.

Miniwaste will be the accelerator of this action by making the population aware of the benefit of home-composting. LIPOR will organize an individual monitoring for each participants, moreover they will be able to exchange their experiences thank to a network of composting masters.

For the project, LIPOR will focus on collective composting because of its social asset : gathering people around a common interest.

Four principal goals :

- Consciousness-raising campaign through local press and sms

- To encourage inhabitants to do home-composting

- To decrease the quantity of organic waste

- To improve the quality of compost

At the end, LIPOR wants to obtain 50 collective composting sites (against 10 at the beginning of the project) and 6 000 compost masters. The training to the eco-shopping and the cooking courses (how to cook leftovers) will be more developed.”

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