Summary and conclusions

Idékatalog til affaldsforebyggelse

Waste prevention in Denmark

There is growing interest in waste prevention both in Denmark and in EU. The adoption of the new Waste Directive (Directive 2008/98/EC) has resulted in greater focus on waste prevention, as the top priority in the waste hierarchy. Consequently, there is a need to exchange experiences with other countries and to develop new ideas for waste prevention.

The second part of the Government’s Waste Strategy 2009-12 contains a plan for increased waste prevention. One of the initiatives in the plan is to establish an overview of new measures for waste prevention.

Waste prevention in Denmark is the joint responsibility of authorities, citizens and companies. Everyone has a responsibility to prevent waste, both individually and together.

This project has been initiated in order to inspire initiatives for waste prevention. To achieve this, a catalogue containing ideas for increased waste prevention that can inspire individual actors has been prepared.

National and international ideas

As a first step an overview was prepared containing ideas based on both national and international literature search. The preliminary overview was also based on the Danish EPA’s material from work undertaken on waste prevention in 2000-01.

The overview was used as background material for the workshop on waste prevention held on August 18th 2009. The workshop involved participants from the relevant groups of actors and contributed with a number of new ideas for increased waste prevention.

The waste prevention catalogue is the result of a compilation and grouping of the different ideas that came to light during the project.

The catalogue has been prepared by the Copenhagen Resource Institute.

Catalogue with ideas for inspiration

The catalogue starts with initiatives that can be used or initiated by 8 different actors:

retail trade,
office and service businesses,
industrial companies,
building and construction contractors,
citizens,
municipalities,
hospitals (regions) and
The State.

The catalogue focuses on practical examples of waste prevention that the individual actor can carry out. It is not an exhaustive list but is meant as inspiration for waste prevention activities that can be performed by the individual actor, associations or organisations alone or cooperatively.

It contains examples of both national and international initiatives implemented within recent years. Because this catalogue is intended as a source of inspiration, there has been no thorough assessment of the relevance of international suggestions to Danish conditions.

Further, the catalogue contains a number of ideas generated by the workshop. Although ideas are grouped under the different actors this does not indicate that representatives of this actor at the workshop agreed to implement the idea. Neither are the practical difficulties of implementing the ideas for waste prevention in a given situation addressed.

Finally, relevant ideas from the Danish EPA’s work with waste prevention in 2000-01 are included.

Some ideas can be carried out by different actors while others need the involvement of more actors. Therefore, many of the ideas are mentioned under several actors, as the catalogue is meant as a reference catalogue.

In total, the catalogue contains more than 100 different ideas for increased waste prevention that will hopefully inspire action among the different actors.