The Mataró-Maresme Circular Park’s proposal for collaboration between the administration and the private sector has a number of features that make it highly innovative.

The director of the Maresme Waste Consortium, Carles Salesa, spoke last Tuesday afternoon in the online seminar “Public-private collaboration in public service companies: success stories”. The activity was organised by the EISP (International School of Public Services), where he shared the virtual stage with the executive president of PWACS, Juan Pablo López Heras, and the General Business Director of Eurecat, Miquel Rey.

The seminar, which was followed by around fifty people, consisted of three digital presentations aimed at showing different cases of successful collaboration between public administration and private enterprise.

3 successful examples of public-private collaboration

During his speech, Miquel Rey presented the reality of an entity such as Eurecat, which, with a relatively young trajectory, has positioned itself as a benchmark technology centre, filling the collaboration and knowledge gap between the academic world and the business sector. Despite this success, Rey explained the challenges for the future and the structural shortcomings in R&D&I which they are facing. He compared the situation with other countries such as Germany.

For his part, Juan Pablo López Heras discussed the experiences of different forms of public-private collaboration used in public services, such as water management, waste collection and treatment, street cleaning and funeral services, among others. He cited different cases from all over Spain, highlighting the formula of joint ventures.
Finally, Carles Salesa spoke about his experience at the head of the Maresme Waste Consortium. An entity that has already applied conventional models of public-private collaboration via concession during its 35 years of existence, with different financing formulas for each generation of infrastructures.

During his presentation, he placed special emphasis on the new modality linked to the new Mataró-Maresme Circular Park. A project which is still in the development phase and that, at this stage, is committed to a proposal for collaboration between the administration and the private sector with features that make it highly innovative. A new formula that proposes long-term land lease under advantageous conditions for tenures over 500 m², including the availability of common services and the possibility of symbiosis in different streams between companies at the Park and the Consortium itself. All of this based on the acceptance of the activities according to the fulfilment of certain circularity criteria.

Thanks to these three experiences, the seminar, which lasted less than two hours, allowed the participants to immerse themselves in different models of participation between the public and private sectors, from an approach that was as real as it was precise.