At the end of the product chain, local and regional authorities are responsible for managing the consequences of current production and consumption patterns: waste.

Waste also represent a loss of valuable resources, many of which are scarce. The production of growing amount of waste and the consumption of huge amounts of natural resources characterise these consumption and production patterns. The discrepancy between consumption levels in industrialised and developing countries constantly increases. This results in economic, social and environmental imbalance.
Such trend is clearly unsustainable and restoring a balance requires a new approach, based on resource efficiency, waste prevention and recycling - namely dematerialisation. Sustainable resource and waste management entails the involvement of all actors in the production and consumption chain: local and regional authorities, consumers, producers and retailers, NGOs and social economy enterprises.

In Europe in the 1990s, regulatory, economic and social drivers confronted local and regional authorities with a new challenge in managing waste. Since then, most LRA have been striving for reducing the amount of municipal waste to handle. Their major motivation is probably to curb growing waste management costs. Despite good results achieved with recycling, this is not enough. Consequently, many LRA turn to strategies favouring prevention at source, re-use and repair, home-composting…
The success of these strategies requires a renewed dialogue and partnerships between all stakeholders in the society. Interactions between LRA and consumers/citizens are of utmost importance there.
In practice, LRA take the opportunity of communication campaigns encouraging selective collection to enlarge their scope. They also promote products generating less waste, reusable products and home composting. In a number of European cities, municipal initiatives to promote sustainable consumption have been identified and described under 15 good practice case-studies.