About Zero Waste Alliance Ireland

Our Vision

At ZWAI we believe human communities should behave like natural ones. Living comfortably within the natural flow of energy from the sun and plants, producing no wastes which cannot be recycled back into the earth’s systems, and guided by new economic values which are in harmony with personal and ecological values.

In nature, the waste products of every living organism serve as raw materials to be transformed by other living creatures or benefit the planet in other ways.

Instead of organising systems that efficiently dispose of or recycle our waste, we need to design systems of production that have little or no waste to begin with.

There are no technical barriers to achieving a “zero waste society”, only our habits, our greed as a society, and the current economic structures and policies which have led to the present environmental, social and economic difficulties.

“Zero Waste” is a realistic whole-system approach to addressing the problem of society’s unsustainable resource flows – it encompasses waste elimination at source through product design and producer responsibility, together with waste reduction strategies further down the supply chain, such as cleaner production, product re-design, repairing, dismantling, recycling, re-use and composting.

Our Work

Zero Waste Alliance Ireland has prepared many policy documents on waste management, we continue to lobby the Government on the issue of sustainable resource and critical materials’ management, and to express our concern at the failure to address Ireland’s waste problems at a fundamental level.

In recent years, as many older landfills were closed or became better managed (primarily as a consequence of the implementation of European Directives, Irish legislation transposing these Directives, the development of a waste licensing regime by the Environmental Protection Agency, and the establishment of the Office of Environmental Enforcement in 2003), the number of affiliated groups concerned about the adverse environmental and public health effects of landfills decreased considerably.

ZWAI therefore concentrated more on the objectives of ensuring that Ireland’s government agencies, local authorities and other organisations will develop and implement environmentally sustainable resources and waste management policies, especially resource efficiency, waste reduction and elimination, the promotion of re-use, repair and recycling, and the development and implementation of the Circular Economy.

ZWAI is primarily concerned with the very serious issue of discarded materials and goods, whether from domestic, commercial or industrial sources, how these become “waste”, and how such “waste” may be prevented by re-design along ecological principles.