We have created the Zero Waste Training Handbook as a comprehensive guide to help empower change agents to increase the impact of their work on zero waste at the local level, as part of our Building a European Zero Waste Academy (BEZWA) project.

The aim of this handbook is to support the implementation of the Zero Waste Ambassador and Trainer curricula, with the overall goal to strengthen and spread zero waste competences among changemakers across Europe, helping to empower them to support and drive their communities towards long term systemic change. Whereas the curricula describe the set up, structure and reasons for selecting certain topics and competences into the training courses, this handbook goes deeper into the topics themselves and offers some exercises and materials to anyone wanting to train Zero Waste Ambassadors and/or Trainers.

This handbook has two main parts: resources for the Zero Waste Ambassador curriculum and for the Zero Waste Trainer curriculum. In the beginning we have also added two chapters on more general principles that are important to both curricula. These chapters focus on the connection between values, wellbeing and zero waste, and on metacognition – the ability to analyse and plan one’s learning process.

The handbook can be read through from the first to the last chapter, or simply by focusing on specific topics. Each chapter is also available as a separate file, to make it easier to share in case there is a need to work with just one topic at a time.

For future improvements, we welcome here your feedback after reading any of these documents.

This document is the result of the BEZWA project (Building a European Zero Waste Academy) – an Erasmus+ funded collaboration between five organisations with the main aim to create a strong educational framework in support of the zero waste cities movement in Europe. The project partners were Zero Waste Europe, Ekologi brez meja, Estonian University of Life Sciences and Tallinn University, with Let’s Do It Foundation as the project coordinator.