Refuse/Rethink/Redesign

Refuse what we don’t need and change the way we produce and consume by redesigning business models, goods and packaging in order to reduce resource-use and waste

Reduce and reuse

Minimise the quantity, toxicity and ecological footprint and any operation by which products or components that are not waste are used again for the same purpose for which they were conceived

Preparation for reuse

Checking, cleaning or repairing operations, by which products or components of products that have become waste are prepared so that they can be re-used without any other pre-processing

Recycling/composting/anaerobic digestion

High quality material recovery from separately collected waste streams

Material and chemical recovery

Technologies to recover materials from mixed waste into new valuable materials in an environmental sound way

Residuals management

What cannot be recovered from mixed waste is biologically stabilised prior to landfilling

Unacceptable

Options that don’t allow for material recovery, have high environmental impact and create lock in effects that threaten the transition to Zero Waste: waste to energy incineration, co-incineration, plastic to fuel, landfilling of non-stabilised waste, gasification, pyrolysis, illegal dumping, open burning and littering