The URBAN-WASTE project puts forward the “Charter of Commitments for Sustainable Material Resources Management and Circular Economy” as an added value to the project by creating stable collaboration and activities going beyond the project’s lifetime. Our 11 pilot cities and regions will represent the core mass of the campaign and be the creators of the mass effect, encouraging other cities and regions to join the network.

The Charter of Commitment, a significant milestone for the URBAN-WASTE project, represents a manifesto aimed at local and regional authorities who want to express their intentions to adapt their tourism sector to the given environmental capacities of the area of interest and further develop and enrich their tourism offer with eco-innovative strategies and measures which will turn tourism more sustainable and environmentally-friendly. This charter reflects local and regional authorities’ intentions to reducing waste generation by tourists and tourism service providers and improving waste management practices. Every tourist city and region or European public authority which is willing to commit to these values of sustainable tourism is invited to join this community and confirm their commitment by signing the Charter. Nonetheless, it also aims to reinforce the attractiveness of the territories as well as to foster local development by creating new green jobs and services locally. Furthermore, this Charter comes in the International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development, in the light of UN’s call for the contribution of the tourism sector to economic, social and environmental sustainability.

Once the Charter was launched in January 2018, it became available for European public local and regional authorities, as well as local and international stakeholders to sign it. By signing the Charter, they won’t only join the cities and regions that have already signed it but also join all the 11 pilots committed to the shared vision contained in the charter. By putting this Charter forward to other European public authorities, the URBAN-WASTE project aims at multiplying and transmitting the same vision of sustainable tourism beyond its own partners.

In March 2018 the Charter attracted attention of other European projects, namely BLUEISLANDS, an Interreg Mediterraean project which gathers numerous islands in the Mediterranean basin around the issue of marine litter and other waste management related issues these islands are facing. Therefore, as of March 2018, the Charter was renamed to URBAN-WASTE and BLUEISLANDS Charter of Commitments

See the Charter of Commitments signatories here