The “Eco-innovation in Greece” country profile was created by the Eco-Innovation Observatory to provide an analysis of such things as the eco-innovation trends in Greece. Prior to reading this analysis, I’ll admit I was unfamiliar with the term eco-innovation and didn’t really know what it meant. However, the definition of eco-innovation provided at the very beginning of the analysis really helped me to understand it in a succinct way. “Eco-innovation in Greece” taught me that Greece’s level of technological innovation is quite low as seen by their reduced patent applications. I was also very surprised and impressed by the fact that the bathing waters in Greece are of a very high quality. However, Greece is currently experiencing an overexploitation of their water resources and a lack of biodiversity in both their land and water ecosystems. Whilst reading “Eco-innovation in Greece,” I was also quite perplexed by the mention of illegal landfills and illegal metal foundries because I didn’t really know that these existed and I’m somewhat curious as to how these originated and what can be done to locate and close them down. On the topic of waste, the analysis mentioned that Greece needs to recycle more as well as the fact that they are lacking appropriate hazardous waste disposal facilities. With all of this talk about waste, I can’t help but think how implementing circular processes and evolving into circular economies would serve to help solve, or at least lessen, this problem. Furthermore, relating back to my Lean and Six Sigma class that I took last semester, there are so many good waste reduction and process improvement methods that I learned about that Greek companies should really try to implement to aid in waste management. On another note, I was so pleased to see that Greece has been doing well in utilizing more solar power by increasing photovoltaic installations. In addition, the analysis discussed transparent solar cells for windows, smart meters, and nanotechnology products, which seem to be interesting concepts that I’m curious to learn more about. Personally, perhaps the most amazing part of the entire analysis was when it talked about Kafireas and the environmental implications of the seven wind farms on the island of Evia. Although it seems like it is quite a complicated operation to develop and run this wind farm, the statistics alone show that it is definitely worth the effort and I truly can’t believe that “Kafireas will help the country achieve full decarbonisation
by 2028!”