WASTE and many of its partners have been cooperating for several years in working on understanding and designing positive interventions to improve the lives and livelihoods of the informal waste and recycling sector in Europe, and at the same time to improve the environmental, energy, and economic performance of municipal recycling systems. Combining these two lines of work is unusual; most work on recycling either ignores the contributions and skills of the informal sector or seeks ways to prevent them from “stealing” materials that the municipal programmes are working to capture.
The realities of recycling in new EU countries suggest that a better course is to work with the informal recycling, reuse, and solid waste sector, and seek to find ways for informal and formal recycling and reuse systems not only to co-exist peacefully, but actually to work together to achieve EU recycling, reuse, and prevention goals. WASTE is a consultant in the multi-year EU project, with a sub-consulting budget of €40.000.