The Slovenian Alpine Association, the country's largest brewery and other partners have teamed up to collect waste aluminium cans and turn them into bivouac shelters in the mountains.

The cans will be collected for a year in dedicated yellow bins at 16 locations around the country as part of a project called Bivouacs for White Peaks.

The plan is to construct three such shelters. They will need roughly 200,000 cans or 1,000 kilos of aluminium, Urban Kramberger from the brewer Laško Union estimated at the project's launch on 22 April.

The cans will be processed into aluminium sheets, and the construction of the first bivouac is set to begin in June 2025.

The first bivouac will be put up in the mountains above Gozd Martuljek, NW, where there is already one, Jože Rovan, the head of the Alpine Association, said.

The locations for the other two bivouacs are yet to be selected.

The main idea behind the project is to renovate the existing bivouacs in the Slovenian mountains, which are between 80 and 90 years old.

"The three bivouacs will meet the current needs and I'll be very happy if the project can be repeated in time, because there are some points where there are no bivouacs and it would be good to put them up," Rovan said.

The project involves several enterprises, including the packaging company Slopak and the metalworking companies Talum, Impol and KOV.

It is part of a broader environmental initiative involving Laško and the Alpine Association, which aims to preserve mountain habitats.

Environmental NGOs have been campaigning for years for the country to introduce a deposit-refund system for drinks packaging, including cans.