From Volcanoes to Reducing Food Waste – Part 1

The 22-year-old from Polzela is finishing her studies of Environmental Protection and Eco-technologies at Environmental Protection College in Velenje. From May to August 2021, she volunteered in Iceland as part of European Solidarity Corps, specifically through the HI ECO Promoters project at Hostelling International Iceland. Simultaneously, she was writing her bachelor’s thesis in which she focused on examining how aware Slovenes are of the importance of the Arctic and Antarctica for the stability of the global climate and how well they’re familiar with the Arctic Angels, the global project where she became the representative for Slovenia just before travelling to Iceland, one of the Arctic countries.

We talked about her adventures, the new knowledge she’s gained and the wonderful memories she has of the time she spent there. The interview consists of two parts. In the first part, we talk more about her work assignments in Iceland, and in the second part, we talk about how she spent her free time there.

You travelled to Iceland as a volunteer. What was the volunteering like? Did you go on your own or through an organisation? What did you like doing the most?

Let me first explain what volunteering under European Solidarity Corps looks like. As a volunteer, you sign a contract with a company that applied with its project, in my case it was HI Iceland. As a volunteer, you have to fill in seven hours of voluntary work from Monday to Friday. The responsibilities and job description are listed in the contract, and you can adjust the project to your needs. You can set your goals and coordinate them with the mentor from the company throughout the project. You’re entitled to breakfast, lunch, accommodation, a small monthly allowance, an extra insurance and reimbursement of travel expenses. I also got a bike and a city bus ticket, and was even gifted a ticket that gave me access to all the city’s pools as well as discounts on various trips. I got this as an “employee” at the organisation. You also get an external mentor. They have no connection with the company, whatsoever, but the company is the one who seeks them out. The mentor has to speak your native language. This is kind of an overview of what volunteering looked like there. It also included an Icelandic course. That’s how I also reached the A1 level.

My job assignments were distributed between two hostels in Reykjavik owned by HI Iceland, Dalur and Loft, as well as the Reykjavik Campsite – the largest campsite in Iceland. My job was to promote sustainable management in both hostels. It was quite an interesting undertaking in the summer season and almost complete lockdown due to the pandemic, since the job didn’t only include promotion, but also the reestablishment of sustainable practices in tourism and hostels, in the new café that’s part of the Dalur hostel, and throughout the wider network of hostels in Iceland. I believe you already know much about that yourself, Alenka, since you were a volunteer there yourself, even during the pandemic.

My favourite activities included even organisation and direct communication with guests at the hostels about travelling in Iceland, as well as raising awareness among the locals, employees and guests of environmental solutions we could implement in everyday life and travel. It was really interesting to see the difference between the awareness of recycling in various cultures. Most people had never even saw so many recycling options in one place before.

David, my other volunteering half, and I organised swap events, which were our favourites. We organised these swap events, namely clothes swaps, in both hostels: in Loft and Dalur. We had two target groups. Loft, which is more of a youth hostel and has a bar, attracted younger people. Lots of younger people – as many as 90 people came and went in three hours at a single event! Dalur, on the other hand, attracted families, the locals from the surrounding areas, and elderly people, since the hostel has a café and it’s also oriented towards this group of people. We stopped organising these events after three months due to the pandemic, but my heart always skipped a beat when people approached me and asked me when the next swap event was going to take place because they really missed those. David and I continued your (Alenka) and Irene’s work and officially opened “Elf Stone” at one of the events where clothes would magically appear out of nowhere. Everyone was welcome to drop by with clothes they didn’t need anymore and the elves would take care of the clothes, made sure they’d circulate, so that everyone could find a hidden treasure just for themselves.

One of my assignments was the management of weekly »Eco Audit« inspections and records. Each week, I would spend one day at each of the hostels and focus on monitoring compliance with the sustainable management and waste, water and electricity management. After that, I would write reports, file them in and recommend improvements. I would then talk to other employees and, together, we would roll up our sleeves and try to improve sustainable management in hostels. As a team, we worked a lot on improving recycling of waste at Dalur’s café and mostly in Reykjavik Camp as well. My job was to manage the waste at Dalur and the camp.

Recycling of waste is an important part in eco-hostels and waste management was quite a responsibility for a volunteer. What was that like? How did you take care of it? I also heard a lot about your engagement in »ZERO FOOD WASTE«. Could you tell me more about that?

Ok, here’s the short version. Waste management at both hostels and the campsite wasn’t really a piece of cake. It’s a process where you have to go with the flow and where you have to monitor the flow of customers as well provide enough litter bins. Good communication is also necessary to spread the information about the locations and how to recycle (which was what David and I did).

At the hostels and camp, you never knew how many people would come and when the dustbins would fill up or when litter bins would become full and the waste collector would have to come and empty them. It all depends on whether the guests are individuals or groups, and whether there are groups of scouts at the camp or groups of campers. The latter ones usually left the most waste. A special feature of Iceland’s that poses a problem when it comes to waste is that it’s an island. People come here with no equipment. They buy it here and then leave it behind when they go. And that results in a pile of waste! Especially since the most popular Icelandic tour follows Route 1, which goes all around the island and includes stops to admire the natural beauty.

My responsibility was to always monitor the flow of waste and contact the waste collectors. Which was a challenge! I noticed that, in Iceland, everything worked a bit more slowly than in Slovenia. You need to take action right away when you’re handling waste. The pandemic has made everything more difficult because the waste management company often didn’t have enough waste collectors at disposal. There was one such example when we were overflowing with waste due to a large unexpected group of visitors who filled up all the litter bins. I called Terra, a waste management company, and told them I urgently needed the waste to be collected by next morning. They told me they’d come. And then they didn’t. I had to get up an hour earlier in the morning to try to salvage the situation. I couldn’t reach anyone at the company because their number was unreachable at 7 a.m. They started at 10 o’clock. That’s when I called them again and asked them why they didn’t collect the waste as they said they would. And the answer? They were short of drivers. I begged them to come as soon as possible, to come that very day. And again, there was no sign of them. It was a lesson learned.

I always carried out things in a way that caused the employees as little stress as possible. Still, we took the unpleasant situation and turned it into a fun situation solving thing, such as “trash parties”. That’s when I expanded my knowledge on how to get around in a certain moment and get the hang of a situation right away on the spot. There were many adventures like that, not just the ones I described.

Now tell me something about food swaps.

“Food swap shelves” were already a practice in both hostels and the camp before. David and I made sure everything was in accordance with the hygiene standards two times a day. On those shelves, guests could leave packaged food which they didn’t eat, which meant many people (including us) never had to buy salt, pasta and garlic. Yeah, somehow those shelves were always stacked with garlic, ha ha. I was surprised when I noticed how almost all food got swapped in two days after guests had left it there. There was also plenty of oil and sugar.

I met my dear friend Kamila from Poland, who lives in Iceland, at one of the events. She started the “Freedge” project as part of Hackathon together with a friend. I immediately got involved and voluntarily helped with that project as well. I got in touch with them, established a good network and together we saved even more food from ending up in the garbage. Whenever there was food overload at the camp and the hostels, I always made sure it ended up in the shared fridge. Anyone could leave food in it and even take something if it was to their liking. We didn’t just make sure the food was circulating at the hostel, but the whole of Reykjavik! And now the fridge has found a home next to the Andrými building in the city centre, which serves as an open community for all. There’s a bike repair shop and, on Fridays, I also helped out at the “traditional” free food markets. We visited bakeries and the market and, luckily, there was enough awareness, so they didn’t want to waste the food. They would always hand it to us and we managed to salvage lots of bread and other baked goods at the free food market from ending up in the waste. It made me more aware of the problem we have as a society when it comes to food waste! So much good food – such as nice bananas and freshly baked goods – that get thrown away all around the world! When you consider that a single bakery in Reykjavik had two large containers of bread and baked goods on a Friday at six p.m., which would otherwise end up in the garbage... We almost set up the same fridge at the camp, but the pandemic stopped us.

You mentioned the pandemic. How did you handle the situation during you stay?

As already mentioned, we had to cancel the swap markets. I planned an event, a river conservation-themed movie night at Loft to be precise. I had plans to play the The Undamaged, a documentary that’s a product of Slovenian creators. You definitely need to watch it if you haven’t yet. It’s available for free at the eponymous website! I prepared all the promotional materials and I was also arranging for a conversation with the producers with Balkan River Defence, which would then take place at the movie night. Sadly, I wasn’t able to see the thing through because Loft got closed down. Despite everything, though, tourism in Iceland has really flourished this year. Rent-a-car companies ran out of cars, the locals started renting their vehicles (laws were changed that made it possible), and rent and accommodation prices skyrocketed all of a sudden, since Iceland was one of the few countries with open borders (with appropriate entry measures). Face coverings weren’t mandatory and I didn’t wear a mask most of the time outside of my job, but we did keep the safety distance (such as in shops).

This was the first part of the interview. The second part will be available in one of the upcoming issues of our Globetrotter Web Magazine. So, stay tuned. Until then, you can read Veronika’s articles in which she describes her Icelandic adventures in greater detail.