Our modern society is centred around mass consumption and not designed to prevent waste…
we buy, we use (often for a short period), and we put in a bin.

The aim of this Pillar is to change this behaviour by raising awareness of Waste PREVENTION approaches that your community can access & adopt, preventing waste from occurring in the first place.

Waste Prevention can be a complex subject but essentially means – reducing everything that goes into our bins – all bins, by changing our purchasing choices & consciously reducing the amount of waste we produce.

We are somewhat conditioned to believe recycling is the solution to waste, however sorting our waste for collection simply passes the problem to someone else to deal with, is very energy intensive, and is often ineffective – it does not prevent waste!’ Waste production and disposal is a huge contributor to accelerated Climate Change, so there’s every reason to concentrate community efforts on preventing it wherever we can.

When we look at the waste hierarchy we begin to see more clearly the division between actions that deal with waste that has already been generated (Recycling, Recovery, Disposal), and those actions which prevent it from occurring in the first place (Prevention, Re-use)

Throughout the year all 5 Greening Campaign Pillars come together to run Joint events. This shows how we can tackle climate change challenges through shared solutions. For example, growing fruit & veg at home cuts down food miles, encourages you to waste less,
and any waste scraps can be composted to use in your next year’s growing reducing waste.

We can all commit to wasting less by simply reducing what we put in the bin every day. When communities work together we have the collective power to avoid our landscapes from becoming a wasteland.