On 19 February ACR+ hosted waste management practitioners to discuss taxation and awareness-raising to improve separate waste collection in the framework of the LIFE REthinkWASTE project which explores how to design municipal tariff systems in order to improve waste governance.
After hearing about almost a dozen cases of municipal efforts to use PAYT and its information-based counterpart Know as You Throw (KAYT), participants reflected on the cases during a workshop. They concluded that, so far, PAYT has not managed to completely solve the inherent injustice of taxation, because certain communities like newcomers to cities continue to be disadvantaged; that the environmental benefits of PAYT and increased rates of separate collection need to be well and frequently communicated to residents in order for PAYT to work; that, in some cases, PAYT and KAYT are schemes that can pay for themselves; and that the social, environmental, and economic benefits of these schemes are very closely interlinked.
All the presentations and videos, as well as the recording of the first half of the seminar, are available on the ACR+ website.
