Urban waste management is one of the most important and urgent challenges facing the Mediterranean region. Several factors contribute to aggravate the situation, such as population growth, increasing tourism or the absence of adequate waste management policies. In the southern and eastern Mediterranean, the challenges in this field are even more acute, in many cases due to high population pressures or the low availability of waste management infrastructures.

The Med4Waste project, co-financed with European funds from the ENI CBC Med programme, has been working to facilitate new governance models for integrated and efficient urban waste management policies to help solve these issues in the Mediterranean Region.

The projects funded by ENI CBC Med are designed to foster cooperation and dialogue between the participating countries, and to favour the creation of cooperation networks and knowledge exchange. The ENI CBC Med program is working on some of these challenges in waste management with a series of projects to create experiences of cooperation between countries, with emphasis on the management of organic matter, the implementation of circular economy practices, the training of citizens, and the implementation of innovative legislative tools.

Med4Waste is a capitalisation project, meaning that it promotes the utilisation and widest dissemination of successful practices and results of previously financed projects. The process of capitalisation has three main steps: the identification of successful practices from other projects, the replication and reuse of those practices, and lastly the mainstreaming of said practices into public policies.

One of the relevant resources is the Med4Waste Waste Management Catalogue that aimed at providing waste management experts and decision-makers in the Mediterranean region with valuable insights into the accomplishments and promising outputs of its capitalised projects.