This booklet is intended primarily for non-governmental organisations and informal groups interested in implementing volunteer, community-based reuse and repair activities. It is based on the experience of three organisations with significant know-how in this field: Zelena akcija (Croatia), Ecorec (Greece) and the Volunteers’ Centre of Vojvodina (Serbia) and has been published as part of the Erasmus+ project Towards Communities of Reuse Practice, carried out from late 2022 to 2025.
The global waste crisis is first and foremost caused by irresponsible resource extraction, production practices and consumption habits. Today, our economic and societal models rely on consumerism to justify exploitation of the Earth’s limited natural resources and over- production, inevitably resulting in a throw-away culture, where still valuable/usable resources are discarded at an ever-faster rate. Moreover, products designed to have a short life cycle are produced in ever increasing quantities.
Although ordinary people did not create the waste crisis and are not its main driver, the situation cannot be improved without their active involvement and awareness about the core environmental and socio- economic issues resulting from inefficient waste management.
Understanding reuse, sustainable consumption and the value of repairability and longevity of the products we buy is a powerful way to create a positive impact on consumer habits, ensure public support for the adoption of truly ambitious legislation and market regulations in this area, and hopefully to contribute to an increase in people’s active involvement in environmental campaigns.
This toolkit focuses on activities that promote waste reduction and reuse. However, in public discourse, these terms are often imprecisely conflated with recycling. It therefore makes sense to define all these terms and explain the important differences between them.