Single-use plastic bag ban advocacy and awareness-raising campaign

TOPICS

advocacy and awareness raising campaign with the final goal to ban single-use plastic bags in Montenegro, stop further contamination of land and waterways and eliminate them from nature and its ecosystems
plastic bag ban advocacy and awareness-raising campaign

PERIOD

2015 – Ongoing

LOCATION

Montenegro

FUNDERS

this project is self-financed by ZWMNE and its volunteers

PARTNERS

citizen initiative #OcistiME!

Summary

The focus of this project is to solve the environmental crisis created by the overuse of single-use plastic bags in Montenegro. Single-use plastic bags are used only for a few minutes and then thrown away. Each citizen of Montenegro uses an average of 400 to 600 single-use plastic bags per year and none is recycled in Montenegro: in the best case, if they do not end up in nature, they are piled up in landfills. We intend to achieve this goal through the most efficient and proven measure for their strong reduction or elimination from the environment, which is a single-use plastic bag ban.

2015

  • Zero Waste Montenegro organized the first Plastic Bag Free Day in Montenegro, with a ‘plastic bag monster’ walking through the streets of Podgorica and educating citizens about the issues of overconsumption of plastic bags.

2017

  • Another Plastic Bag Free Day was organized with a Plastic Bag Monster present at a key tourist attraction point in Montenegro.
  • ZWMNE started a national petition in 2017 link to ask citizens of Montenegro to support the ban on plastic bags: 3600 people signed the petition that we delivered to the Ministry

2018

2019/2020

  • ZWMNE met with the Minister of Sustainable Development and Tourism who said the Ministry will assist ZWMNE to ‘ban plastic bags, plastic bottles and educate all kids in Montenegro on proper waste disposal. Despite those encouragements, ZWMNE didn’t receive any concrete support from the Ministry so far to achieve those goals.
  • Ociste.me, a citizen group established to fight (plastic) littering in Montenegro was founded by a group of active citizens, and conducted a second petition to bank plastic bags: over 5100 signed the petition that was also delivered to the Ministry MORiT.
  • Plastic bags will no longer be free – interview of Dragan Asanovic

2021/2022

  • With help of an external expert from the Zero Waste Europe network, we analysed the draft of Law on Waste Management and created a document containing comments, proposals and rationale. The plastic bag ban was finally introduced in the new Law. The law is announced to be put in force by the end of 2022, after which the implementation shall start.

2023

  • At the session on October 3, 2023, at the proposal of the Ministry of Ecology, Spatial Planning and Urbanism, the Government established the Draft Law on Waste Management, which prohibits the use of light plastic bags with a thickness of 15-50 microns.
  • The Law also includes a program of extended producer responsibility, which implies that importers and producers in Montenegro have overall and organizational and financial responsibility for the waste generated when placing products on the market.
  • It also mentions the formation of an inspection at the state level, whose main task will be to control the implementation of local municipal waste management plans. The reason for this legal solution is the ineffectiveness of the supervision of the communal inspection and the communal police.