Waste Management in Practice – SCEWC 2025

At Smart City Expo World Congress 2025 in Barcelona , Grigoris Konstantellos, Mayor of Municipality Vari Voula Vouliagmeni , took part in the main Congress program in the panel “Waste Not, Want Not: How Do We Create Resource-Smart Cities?”, moderated by Laura Reupke , CEO of BABLE Smart Cities.

The discussion stayed deliberately close to practice. Instead of broad sustainability narratives, the panel focused on what actually changes when cities treat waste as a resource and operations as a system. Representing a municipality already deep into implementation, Grigoris Konstantellos described how Municipality Vari Voula Vouliagmeni has moved beyond pilots.

More than half of the city’s waste is already diverted from landfill, with a clear path toward 70% by 2026. Sensor-equipped bins, adaptive collection routes, organics recovery, and energy use were discussed not as innovation for its own sake, but as operational tools that reduce cost, stabilise daily performance, and free up resources for reinvestment.

What emerged clearly from the discussion is that this shift depends less on isolated technologies and more on operational continuity. This is where the role of EmDoT SA, working in close alignment with the Municipality and the Mayor, becomes visible without needing emphasis. Together with COSMOTE, EmDoT SA supports the decision layer that translates field data, such as volume, weight, timing, routing, into nightly execution.

The discussion explicitly highlighted outcomes such as dynamic routing, lower collection costs, and predictable operations under seasonal pressure, allowing savings to be redirected into circular practices rather than absorbed by inefficiencies.

Alongside the Mayor, the conversation brought together Janine Osborne (CEO, Sustainable Seas Trust ), Eva Egido Delgado (Global Head of Sustainability & Compliance, FCC Environment), and Cecília Correia (Strategic Water Industry Solutions Expert at Bentley Systems), each approaching the same problem from a different edge of the value chain: communities, large-scale operations, data, and urban systems.

Overall, the panel made one thing clear. Resource-smart cities are not built through declarations or pilots, but through systems that hold up over time, under pressure, with real crews and real constraints. In that sense, the Vari–Voula–Vouliagmeni case speaks about municipal discipline and execution,
a role EmDoT SA is embedded in!