The twelfth edition of the European Week for Waste Reduction will take place from 21 to 29 November, an initiative to promote awareness-raising actions on sustainability and proper waste management.
At the heart of this environmental communication campaign, born within the LIFE+ Programme of the European Commission, there is a need to increase awareness about the excessive quantities of waste produced and the need to drastically reduce it. The emphasis is therefore on waste prevention, and every action of the European Week for Waste Reduction (SERR) shows how every player in society – including individual citizens – can help reduce waste firsthand and communicate this message of action to others.
The actions implemented during the SERR concern "3R": reduction, reuse and recycling. Following this hierarchy, wastereduction should always be the first priority: reducing means first of all carrying out rigorous prevention and reduction at source, because "the best waste is what is not produced".
The second option is the reuse of products and/or their components: reusing objects decreases the use of material and energy resources and reduces pollution and degradation of the environment.
Finally, the third priority is the recycling of materials, that is, any restoration operation that occurs after collection and according to which waste materials are transformed into products, materials or substances, both for original purposes and for other purposes: through recycling, waste is a secondary source of raw material.
Eco-design can also make a decisive contribution to waste reduction: thanks to the LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) methodology it is possible to analyze and evaluate the entire life cycle of products, identifying their critical issues, in order to find solutions that contribute to the reduction of resource use, energy consumption and waste production.