From 21 till 22 April 2016, Ljubljana is hosting the Zero Waste Europe and Zero Waste Cities meeting. The key topic of the meeting is preventing waste production.

The meeting is organized by Ecologists without Borders and the Zero Waste Europe organisation in cooperation with the City of Ljubljana and Snaga Ljubljana.
Zero Waste Europe brings together 19 national organisations, over 300 local communities and different other organisations, companies and individuals from all around Europe. It is the voice of almost seven million of its inhabitants.
This year for the first time a part of the meeting is dedicated to Zero Waste Cities. The first day of the programme is focused on waste prevention and a discussion on the opportunities such measures offer to local communities. In three round tables the participants are going to learn about good practices regarding borrowing and using washable diapers in kindergartens, waste prevention in tourism and methods of reducing the quantity of edible food that ends up in the garbage.
The morning programme on the second day of the meeting is dedicated to cities. They are going to discuss what opportunities and challenges present themselves in practise with the implementation of Zero Waste plans.
The meeting is going to conclude with the presentation of the expert work of the Zero Waste Europe organisation and some of the successful projects. The presentation of Ljubljana’s achievements as the first European capital on the path towards a Zero Waste society is going to be followed by a discussion on the impact of waste management on climate change, on how to support reuse of electrical and electronic equipment and on the specific problem of recycling plastic waste created as a by-product of paper recycling.
The meeting is open to everybody working in the fields of municipal waste, prevention of its production, reuse, separate waste collection, recycling and composting, and the participation is free of charge.
Ljubljana was chosen to host the meeting at the suggestion of Ecologists without Borders, the national Zero Waste organisation for Slovenia. Ljubljana, European Green Capital 2016, is namely the first European capital city on the path towards a Zero Waste society and the European capital with the highest share of separately collected waste (65% in 2015).
Details on the meeting are available at the event web site.