Bridging continents, building change: stories from the Global Gathering on Organics

During the last few days here in Brussels, ZWE organised what we called a ‘global gathering on organics’ – becoming the largest event we convened here in Europe in regards to the number and diversity of participants from around the world.

The 2 day event brought together 34 participants from 24 countries across all 5 continents – from Brazil to Bulgaria, Portugal to the Philippines. We had funders, city officials, zero waste practitioners and broader civil society groups all represented during the meeting to define shared barriers and design joint solutions for our work. 

The central question that we gathered around and spent our time exploring was what can this group do to accelerate the reduction of methane emissions from the waste sector in our communities? Zero waste solutions for organic waste of course have to be tailored to each specific community context, but globally, there is a common framework and set of policies which unite municipalities around the world in regards to implementing effective organic waste systems. For example during the training we had representatives from two very different municipalities – the city of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, which has a population of 6.2 million people, and also Estonia’s second largest island, Hiiumaa, which has a population just under 10,000.

We learnt from some of the best practices happening on organics waste management and prevention globally, such as San Fernando in the Philippines which is diverting 89% of municipal waste generated for recycling & reuse. Groundwork from Durban (South Africa) shared their innovative process and methods for meaningfully engaging the local community in their food waste collection and composting project, centred around ensuring the expertise of waste pickers sits at the heart of any system that’s designed. 

The discussions were designed not only to help identify solutions and share knowledge, but also to bring some joy and hope to our collective movement. At the end of the gathering, we can identify a number of key takeaways:

• A shared impact monitoring framework for any municipal project globally can be found, and hopefully starting to be used soon, meaning we can compare results across municipalities and showcase our collective impact;
• Greater investment in community engagement is critical but there is still great room for improvement on how we work with our communities today, using creative methods and ensuring local expertise, often lying with groups whose voice is less heard than others, sits at the heart of policy design. Otherwise these policies will be destined to fail from the start.
• Blended finance and private investment currently still ends up too often providing capital for false solutions. As a collective, we need to find how to better package up the projects and solutions we want funding, often community-led and decentralised, to ensure they speak the language of investors and reach a financial size big enough to be attractive to them.

The gathering was possible thanks in large part to the ongoing support and trust in our work from the UMI Fund, who also joined us in Brussels and to whom we are extremely grateful for their ongoing work to build a global movement on climate justice and zero waste.

Photo credits: @Javier Bernal Revert