European waste prevention policies during international conference organised by WasteServ

Waste prevention policy was the main theme of an international conference held by WasteServ as part of the ‘Pre-waste’ project in which WasteServ has been a project partner together with other entities from across Europe for the past three years.

The Pre-waste project is focused on improving the effectiveness of waste prevention policies in EU territories and encouraging the implementation of such policies in the partner countries – Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Bulgaria and Romania.

With a total value of €1.8 million, of which roughly €131,000 were allocated to Malta, the project has three main objectives: Firstly, the project will result in a set of guidelines for the planning, implementation and monitoring of regional waste prevention policies; secondly, the project aims to identify 20 good practices in terms of waste prevention and encourage their implementation in the various partner countries; and the project will also result in the creation of a web tool for assessing and monitoring the effectiveness of waste prevention policies.

These deliverables are being achieved through various measures. At the initial stage of the project, each partner identified 10 waste prevention good practices, thus resulting in the identification of 100 good practices. The partners discussed these good practices and shortlisted the best 50, following which a second shortlist was made resulting in a set of 20 best practices. Malta was represented in the shortlisted best practices by means of a WasteServ project which saw job seekers being trained in waste management and eventually employed to carry out the same training in households.

Through conferences held in various partner countries, the project partners also studied various methods for monitoring the effectiveness of waste prevention measures through the development of a web tool. The main goal of the web tool is to help public authorities and any other stakeholders with the prior assessment of the policy’s potential as well as its monitoring.

The conference held in Malta is aimed at finalising the details of the web tool and discussing its use among policy makers. The final conference of the project is being held in November in Brussels, when the web tool is expected to be officially launched, thus completing the dissemination of all deliverables of the project.