Living waste free
These principles are:
- refuse ‘buying’ plastics while shopping
- reduce the use of energy, water, paper, cloths, and other stuff
- reuse things like reusable bottles and straws, washable cotton and diaper,
- repair instead of throwing and buying new
- recycle
To engage and motivate the participants we used an interactive and digital platform, developed in The Netherlands and tested by more than 100 municipalities.
The campaign consisted of 15 assignments – one per week - helping participants to reduce their waste. For example, we asked participants to count daily the number of new opened packaging, to take a picture of the produced waste after preparation of a dinner and to stimulate cooking with left overs, to share the best practices to reduce waste, to explore where in the house waste commence, to share addresses where to buy in bulk an so without packaging, to see what you can share or give a second live, to count the number of unused many electric devices, to pay attention on Christmas shopping and ecological wrapping up, to experience the zero waste living out of home.
And of course, every week the participants posted their amount of waste on the platform, enabling them to follow up their own progress as well as the progress of the entire group of participants.
Results
- 157 households participated, of which 60% living in the project area of Circular South.
- 45% of the participants shared tips and tricks via the platform, which means 5 posts a day
- 40% posted their amount of waste
- After 100 days the group of participants obtained a waste reduction of 68% (2,5 kilo/week) compared with the average household in the city of Antwerp (7,8 kilo/week)
Author: Maud Coppenrath- Antwerp Circular South Project Manager
Circular economy
