Somewhere in a hidden corner of the Alexa shopping centre in Berlin is a place where visitors would be ill-advised to go, despite potentially being attracted by the tunnels and rooms that shoppers may not even be aware of. It is a place where the stench is almost unbearable, and the amount of rubbish is measured in tonnes: a facility that sorts and collects waste material produced by the shopping centre.

”This is one of the biggest mistakes being made in Romania – people talk about waste material and rubbish, but not about prospective resources. Another mistake is that in Romania sorting and collecting waste materials costs us money, whereas in Germany we get money for this,” says Ingo Nissen, country manager of Portuguese developer Sonae Sierra, which entered the Romanian market by buying River Plaza in Ramnicu Valcea. The manager, who supervised the development of the Alexa shopping centre in Berlin, talks about the recycling rate of waste material produced daily by a mall as a means of cutting operating costs, both in terms of the prospective sums received for collecting the waste, and in terms of cutting cleaning costs. ”For River Plaza we have set a 25.9% recycling target, but we have already exceeded it, we are at 29%. In Alexa, the rate is 60%; it is not easy to motivate people in Romania, but this is a good rate.”

Recycling targets are just one of the methods used for cutting operating costs of shopping centres, amid an around 20% rent decline, according to real estate consultants. ”Tenants do not perceive the rent they pay as a sum consisting of service charges plus the actual rent, they see it as a whole” explains Georgiana Andrei, senior retail broker with consulting firm Colliers International. According to a company study, service charges paid in Romanian shopping centres are among the highest in the region – close or even higher than in the UK – at 11 euros per square metre.

TRADUCERE DE LOREDANA FRATILA-CRISTESCU SI DANIELA STOICAN