Recycling company teams up with Bulgarian cities to fight cardiac arrest deaths

The new initiative will achieve that by upping the recycling rate of plastic bottles and aluminium cans by 70% until December

Today, the Bulgarian recycling company ECOPACK announced a new project, partnering with 14 municipalities to increase the collection rate of aluminium cans and plastic bottles. The company will help the municipalities build promotional campaigns and increase the collection rate by 70% until December.

In exchange, every municipality that reaches the threshold will receive a donation of automated defibrillators in public spaces. This is because cardiac arrest is a big problem for local healthcare services and a quick response is key to favourable outcomes.

A push for more recycling

The campaign is called ‘Urban Recycliad’ (Градска Рециклиада) and it involves 14 municipalities including Dobrich, Kyustendil, Lovech, Karlovo, Dupnitsa, Panagyurishte, Karnobat, Aytos, Peshtera, Botevgrad, Hisarya, Levski, Stamboliyski and Dimitrovgrad.

The municipalities will have to increase the recycling rate of aluminium cans and plastic bottles by 70% from March to December 2023, compared to the same period last year. Local authorities will have to use their own channels of communication to convince both citizens and businesses to change their habits.

ECOPACK will help the municipalities by providing communication resources like website designs, as well as info-posters to reach a larger audience.

Plastic bottles and aluminium cans are a special case among waste because they can be recycled at 100%, yet many of them end up in landfills, slowly decomposing for hundreds of years in nature.

First aid  

Cardiac arrest is a major concern for Bulgaria and the European Union as a whole. The EU sees around 400,000 deaths of cardiac arrest per year, nearly 1,000 per day. At the same time, Bulgarian authorities report an average of 10,000 deaths per year, 10 times more than car crashes, fires and natural disasters combined.

Meanwhile, public automated defibrillators can make a big difference as first aid in the span of 3 minutes of an incident can raise survival rates dramatically. These devices, on the other hand, can be used by anyone who is a witness to a sudden cardiac arrest incident.