The European Week for Waste Reduction (EWWR) is a 3 year project supported by the LIFE+ Programme of the European Commission until 2011. It aims to organize multiple actions during a single week, across Europe, that will raise awareness about waste reduction. Each year, the most outstanding actions are rewarded during an awards ceremony in Brussels at the heart of the European institutions. The EWWR actually lasts 9 days and takes place during the last complete week of November, from Saturday to Sunday. In 2011, the EWWR will take place between 19 and 27 November. Since the beginning of the project, more than 7.000 awareness raising actions on waste prevention have been implemented in the framework of the EWWR.

The five partners of this project are the ADEME (the French Environment and Energy Management Agency – project coordinator), the ACR+ (the Association of Cities and Regions for Recycling and sustainable Resource management – project technical secretariat), the ARC (the Catalan Waste Agency), the IBGE (Brussels Environment, public administration for the environment and energy) and LIPOR (the Intermunicipal Waste Management Service of Greater Porto).

Purpose

• To raise awareness about waste reduction strategies and about the policies of the European Union and its Member States on this subject
• To promote sustainable waste reduction actions across Europe
• To highlight the work accomplished by various actors, through concrete examples of waste reduction
• To encourage changes in the behaviour of Europeans (consumption, production) in everyday life

Who is the Week for?

• For those public authorities across Europe that have competence in the field of waste prevention that responded to a Call for Interest launched by the official partners of the project. These EWWR Organisers act as coordinators of the Week in the area covered by their authority, thereby ensuring the registration and validation of actions proposed by various Project Developers.
• For “Project Developers” interested in carrying out awareness raising actions on the subject of waste prevention during the Week, with the aim of informing the greatest possible number of citizens. These Project Developers register their proposals for EWWR actions through the national, regional or local Organiser covering their area.

5 categories of Project Developer:

• Administration/public authority
• Association/NGO
• Business/industry
• Educational establishment
• Other (for example : hospital, retirement home, cultural centre etc.).
• For European citizens who participate in actions set up by Project Developers during the Week and learn about the kind of waste reduction habits that they can take up in everyday life.

Five themes of the EWWR

• Too much waste
• Better production
• Better consumption
• A longer life for products
• Less waste thrown away

See also

• Waste minimisation
  Waste minimisation
  Waste minimization is the process and the policy of reducing the amount of waste produced by a person or a society.Waste minimization involves efforts to minimize resource and energy use during manufacture. For the same commercial output, usually the fewer materials are used, the less waste is...
  
  
• Reuse
  Reuse
  To reuse is to use an item more than once. This includes conventional reuse where the item is used again for the same function, and new-life reuse where it is used for a different function. In contrast, recycling is the breaking down of the used item into raw materials which are used to make new...
  
  
• Waste hierarchy
  Waste hierarchy
  The waste hierarchy refers to the 3 Rs of reduce, reuse, recycle, or and [ which classify waste management strategies according to their desirability. The Rs are meant to be a hierarchy, in order of importance...
  
  
• Waste management
  Waste management
  Waste management is the collection, transport, processing or disposal,managing and monitoring of waste materials. The term usually relates to materials produced by human activity, and the process is generally undertaken to reduce their effect on health, the environment or aesthetics...
  
  
• Miniwaste
  Miniwaste
  Miniwaste is a European project , co-funded by the LIFE+ programme of the European Commission. It is designed to “bring bio-waste back to life”...
  
  
• Pre-waste

External links

• European Week for Waste Reduction