ACR+

With reference to the federal Waste Prevention Programme (WPP), the Circular Economy Act stipu-lates that appropriate standards for defined waste prevention measures must be specified in order to record the progress made in decoupling the effects on people and the environment associated with waste generation from economic growth. The Circular Economy Act provides the possibility of naming concrete quantitative or qualitative indicators, which, however, represents a particular challenge in view of the complexity and variety of concrete waste prevention measures, the affected waste streams and the involved groups of actors at various levels (federal, state and municipal authorities). In addi-tion, the decline in volumes of individual waste streams cannot directly be attributed to the effects of waste prevention measures due to structural and economic developments. The WPP already identifies a number of possible indicators for individual measures, sectors or material flows. However, there are considerable knowledge gaps to which extent these indicators can represent waste generation or ef-fects of waste prevention measures. Against this background, the aim of this project was to analyse possible evaluation criteria for the measurement of waste prevention success in depth and to test their suitability for assessing the success of the measures established in the WPP. Based on the test result, a set of indicators was developed to enable a continuous measurement of the success of waste preven-tion measures.