European Week for Waste Reduction

The European Week for Waste Reduction (EWWR) is the biggest campaign to raise awareness about waste prevention in Europe. Driven by local and regional public authorities, it encourages all sorts of other actors — citizens, schools, businesses, NGOs, associations — to organise activities to raise awareness about waste reduction during one single week. The EWWR takes place every year in the last week of November.

The actions implemented in the EWWR address the “3Rs”: Reduce waste, Reuse products, Recycle materials. The project also includes a European clean-up day, entitled “Let’s Clean Up Europe”, which is tackling the littering issue.

EWWR coordinators and action developers

The EWWR engages thousands of participants every year, who organise actions involving their local communities. Everyone can take part in the EWWR by organising their own activities and becoming what are called "action developers". Action developers are classified into 5 categories: public administration & organisation, association/NGO & organisation of public interest, business & industry, educational establishments, and citizen(s).

The EWWR is coordinated by local, regional, or national authorities competent in the field of waste reduction - called “EWWR coordinators”- who promote the EWWR and ensure the registration and validation of actions proposed by Project Developers within the territory on which they are competent.

Partners and Steering Committee

The European Week for Waste Reduction (EWWR) was born in 2009 as an EU-funded LIFE+ project. The initiative came from public authorities around Europe willing to join forces on waste prevention. The founding partners were:

• ADEME (the French Environment and Energy Management Agency – project coordinator)
• ACR+ (the Association of Cities and Regions for Recycling and sustainable Resource management – project technical secretariat)
• ARC (the Catalan Waste Agency)
• AICA, the International Association for Environmental Communication (Italy)
• IBGE (Brussels Environment, public administration for the environment and energy) and
• LIPOR (the Intermunicipal Waste Management Service of Greater Porto).
• NWMD, the National Waste Management Directorate for Hungary

After four successful years, the project was further funded until 2017. For an overview of the project during this period, you can consult the EWWR Layman’s report.[1]

Since 2017, the project has been financed and coordinated by a Steering Committee.

Find out more on this initiative on the EWWR webiste: https://ewwr.eu/