European food-waste-reduction projects receive recognition

Six projects were honored in late May at a two-day congress held in Budapest, Hungary, called “New Approaches to the National Waste Management.”

The projects were selected from 18 finalists competing for the awards created on behalf of the European Week for Waste Reduction (EWWR) 2014 and honoring the best actions implemented. The sixth edition of the EWWR awards program focused on food waste.

The awards honored one project in each of six categories:

• Administration/public authority: Strasbourg Detention Centre, Alsace, France, was honored for its project to reduce food waste generated by a prison. Thanks to an exhibition and video broadcast on the prison’s internal video channel, the effort reached 1,000 individuals.
• Association/nongovernmental organization: Foodwe.org of Wallonia, Belgium, is an online platform allowing various food professionals to provide supplies of unsold but still edible food to charitable or civic associations. More than 3,500 kilograms of food waste were donated in 2014, according to EWWR organizers.
• Business/industry: Unilever Food Solutions of Flanders, Belgium, was recognized for its United Against Waste Challenge calling for 36 restaurants in France, Netherlands and Belgium to conduct an audit of their kitchen waste and then implement reduction actions. Nine pilot sites achieved an average 20 percent reduction.
• Educational establishment: Bethlen Gabor UAG Kincskeresco Tagiskolaja of Budapest created a software program designed to motivate children to reduce waste. Nearly 120 students and teachers participated, leading to a reduction of around 10 kilograms of food waste.
• Citizens: Yacine Canamas of Brussels was honored for his project to reduce the amount of waste produced by his family over one year, which proved to be 120 times less waste than the typical European family.
• Others: Jose Germans Trias I Pujol Hospital of Badalona, Spain, was honored for its multistep approach to reduce food waste. The hospital reduced its waste production by 50 percent from 2013 to 2014.
  
  

Since 2009, EWWR has inspired 12,000 projects in 28 countries. The next EWWR takes place Nov. 21-29, 2015, and will focus on dematerialization. For more information, visit www.ewwr.eu.

EWWR was launched with the support of the LIFE+ Programme of the European Commission and is coordinated by the Association of Cities and Regions for Recycling and Sustainable Resource Management (ACR+) in cooperation with national and regional organizations. Project partners are the International Association for Environmental Communication from Italy (AICA), the Catalan Waste Agency (ARC), the Brussels Region environmental agency (IBGE-BIM) and the National Waste Management Directorate for Hungary (NWMD).