I can think of two possible ways of doing this. The first is to do a 'before and after' comparative study, analysing the contents of household waste bins before an intervention and then doing the same analysis at different time periods after the intervention (e.g. after 3 months, 6 months, 1 year) to see if there's a decrease and whether it's sustained or just goes back to baseline levels after a while.

Another, perhaps more time consuming (but also more interesting and pleasant!) way would be to do a qualitative study and actually interview people, individually or in focus groups, about what they throw away and what they no longer throw away. There might be some who just tell you what they think you want to hear, but it will depend on how you present the study.

My manager, Professor Marie Harder ,is doing interesting work on waste management in Shanghai - check out her publications

Dear Gemma,

Your both ideas are very interesting.... I wish I could have research paper on that.

A time series analysis of household consumption and material flow would be another approach for measuring the avoidable waste...

Dear Atiq,

I work with Dr. Lasaridi, A. Zorpas and Dr. Abeliotis on that project, and I am afraid there is no a straight answer. In my opinion a combination of interviews (through questionnaires and diaries) and waste composition analyses before and after a raising awareness campaign is needed. You have to take into consideration that people are not familiar with waste prevention, so you might need to organize more than one campaigns.

Dear Atiq,

how tricky is your question confirms the proposal of the Czech "Waste Prevention Program", which lacks any fundamental indicator for measuring the effectiveness of politic measures (unfortunately there's no english version of this document). Furthermore the proposed measures are defined very vaguely, so you can't measure what is not measurable.

From my point of view the only way how to measure the effectiveness of waste prevention strategies is the combination of questionnaire (based on the methodology of sociologists as in the case of 'environmental behavior' in the recycling) and pilot studies of chosen households that are subjects of the specific prevention strategies.

I agree with Christina but I'm afraid that the waste composition analyses before and after can be misleading (as in the case of unit-based fees and their impact on the waste composition and total amount of household waste)....

Dear Jan Slavik,

Thank you for your comment. I completely agree with you... the challenges in measuring the waste prevention are not only exist in the waste composition but also in the amount of waste that prevent by changing behavior or changing design parameters (alternative packaging for instance). What we need at this moment is a tool or index system that can at least give a benchmark for the waste prevention at household level. Obviously that can be based on the combination of questionnaire and other methods.

I have one more comment to the effectiveness of prevention strategies: any prevention strategy in the Czech Republic is threatened by the fact that households have no correct information about the price of waste services ( the average household pays only 70 % of eligible costs of the waste management). The system lacks the price signal for households to prevent waste. From my experience the price incentives play an important (but not the only!) role by motivating households to prevent waste.

Great discussion first to measure the effectiveness of any intervention quantification is must. Surveys can be good idea but I would suggest in many societies a small waste tax can be quite effective. The more you produce more you pay? Else there can be incentive in fo of some subsidy. Guess these can be very effective.

nice discussion..i just read all comments for now.

greeting from Aceh-indonesia