R4R - Regions for Recycling

18 June 2013 Content

Introduction to the Project

Municipal Waste recycling in Europe: Despite common waste and recycling goals, there are still wide disparities between European Regions

R4R (Regions for Recycling) is an INTERREG IVC project which aims at promoting regional contributions to the European Recycling Society, by allowing local and regional authorities to make consistent comparisons thanks to a common method and exchange of transferable good practices related to local instruments in order to improve recycling performances.

The European Waste Policy aims at preventing waste generation and optimising the use of waste as resources, in order to move towards a European Recycling Society. Regional and local authorities are key actors that concretely implement this concept: many legal, economic and educational instruments are to be decided at this decentralized level. Yet these local authorities face many new challenges with waste management: while generated quantities are continuously increasing, they must comply with stricter legislation and set more complex waste management systems encouraging more active involvement of the population.

Therefore, it is relevant for these local authorities to share good practices and develop benchmarks between them. In 2010, ACR+ created with its members the European decentralised Observatory of municipal waste recycling performances, where local authorities can compare their performances through the use of common concepts and indicators. The R4R project will capitalize on these first efforts towards a better knowledge and monitoring of performances and completes it by identifying conditions and instruments that allowed achieving high performances for waste recycling based on sound comparisons of local data. Its main objectives are to optimize data collection and benchmark on recycling performances as well as to link them with legal, economic, educational, technical and organisational waste management tools allowing high recycling performances. Economics instruments improving recycling performances such as pay as you throw systems, tax on disposal, incentives and extended producer responsibility schemes will be especially analysed.

To expand the dissemination of the project and the collection and exchange of data, an online tool will be set up and free to use for European local and regional authorities. It will allow users to input data, assess recycling performances and have access to benchmarking and good practices related to their context. Several training sessions and EU conferences are planned to improve the participation of European territories.

Project Partners have been selected among public entities involved in waste management, monitoring or planning, presenting a variety of experienced and less experienced territories. To ensure that every partner is actively involved whatever its experience in waste management is, each less experienced partner will be assisted by an advanced one through peer review process throughout the project. Each partner will set an implementation plan stating how outcomes will be used, either by transferring identified good practices or by promoting efficient local instruments.

A website has been built to provide additional information and to publish the outputs of the project. conference handouts

Project Partners:

ORDIF ( Ile de France) ,