CTC, in partnership with Community Reuse Network Ireland (CRNI), The Rediscovery Centre and The Eastern Midlands Waste Region, recently started a two year medium scale EPA research project on Quantifying and Qualifying the Reuse Sector in Ireland.
The project aims to provide a crucial overview of the non-waste reuse sector of Ireland at the current time. By developing methodologies for the quantitative and qualitative assessment of the sector, it will provide policy makers, stakeholders and practitioners with a clear overview of reuse and its performance.
The quantitative data provided by the research will allow Ireland to benchmark its reuse sector against those of other Member States and regions. It will also allow benchmarking of our current status against the performance of future years, to show growths in the sector. This is vital as Europe moves towards a Circular Economy model. It will also provide policy makers with a picture of the scale of reuse that can be compared to overall material flow, consumption rates, waste arisings and rates of recovery and recycling.
The project will develop an overview of what is happening in other countries, especially best practice, so the best possible methodologies can be applied in Ireland, and where there are gaps in the information, so that we may find ways of bridging such gaps. This is also a test of the reuse sector and its capabilities to acquire and supply the required data. This can allow policy makers to provide the required supports to the sector to bridge such gaps so that better overviews can be achieved in the future and possible targets can be met. It may also provide information to future potential investors to support job creation and social enterprise, as well as supporting the provision of low cost, high value products for those who cannot afford more expensive, more resource intensive, less environmentally-friendly new alternatives.
For more information about this project contact:
Dr. Colum Gibson, Clean Technology Centre.
This project is funded under the EPA Research Programme 2014-2020. The EPA Research Programme is a Government of Ireland initiative funded by the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment.
This research supports the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, in particular Goal 12 for Responsible Consumption and Production.
