Effective waste management is heavily dependent on the development of innovative solutions for waste collection and treatment. This is where public procurement comes in: it can act as a key instrument to galvanise the market in order to preserve and recycle material resources. Public procurement of innovation (PPI), particularly, is a way to encourage the development of new, more efficient solutions.

Public procurement of innovation (PPI) can be hampered by a lack of cross-border coordination, limited access to best practice cases, and limited or no knowledge of close-to-market innovative solutions.

The PPI4Waste project explored mechanisms to overcome barriers to public procurement of innovation in the waste sector.

Who was involved?
The PPI4Waste Consortium comprised 8 partners  and lasted for almost 3 years. A number of activities took place within the project lifetime to help increase uptake of innovative waste solutions. These included:

• Creation of an interest group and purchasing community as well as of an Expert Group
• Capacity-building workshops to reinforce knowledge on PPI procedures
• One procurement foresight and one international state-of-the-art workshop
• An international final conference of the project
• Publication of different reports