Good practice:

Measures to avoid waste placements near the container

There is not one single solution for preventing placements near the container. If it is a good spot for growing plants a small garden can be placed around the container. Where there is a beautiful garden people will not put garbage in there. In order to have the garden stay neat we ask the neighbourhood to adopt it.
If the place doesn’t offer the option of a small garden we use clear facilities such as wrapping the container with a sign of the material it is for or signs about which kind of garbage/raw material need to be put into which container. In order to keep the containers clean we also use the adoption of a container by someone out the neighbourhood. The inhabitants who adopt a container get a so-called participation pass by which they can deposit small placements in the residual waste container. The first results are promising.
Placements near the container happen more in neighbourhoods where a lot of immigrant live and/or poor people. These people have much more important things on their mind than separating garbage correctly. In these neighbourhoods we work together with housing associations and refugee work Apeldoorn. Instruction videos on how to separate your garbage in different languages (Turkish, Arabic, Somali and Afghan) were made. The presenter is a local hero – an inhabitant who’s known by everyone because of for example their shop or restaurant they have.

• Small gardens (€1.800 per container)
• Wrapping or signs (€750 per container)
• Project leader for citizens (€20.400 )
• Communication and citizens investigation (€11.600 of external costs )
• Participation pass and costs of deposits (€0,75 for a 20 litre garbage bag and €1,50 for 40 litre bag

On the hot spots treated with the mentioned interventions the reduction of placements near the container varies from 30% to 60%.

The challenges encountered are mainly internal:
• Why communicate in another language? Dutch is the norm.
• Could the participation pass lead to abuse for their own garbage or of the neighbors?

The most important things we learned are:
• There is no one size fits all. Always take into account the context of the location and the people living there.
• Always involve the residents and the housing association (if applicable) in order to make it their solution and not of the government.
• The first results of working with participation is that the problem with trash starts at home. An advisable next project would be targeting at recycling at homes.