It's overall accepted that without new initiatives, waste volumes are projected to continue to rise in the foreseeable future. In addition to requiring valuable space, the management of wastes releases numerous pollutants to air, water and soil including greenhouse gas emissions from landfills and waste transportation. Waste also represents a loss of valuable resources, many of which are scarce and could be recovered and recycled to help us reduce our demand for virgin raw materials.

The 6th Environment Action program considers as a specific "priority" waste stream the biodegradable household waste and it states that a Legislative initiative must be developed in order to treat the municipal wastes in a different way than land filling.

The key to achieving both high diversion rates from landfill and high reuse, recycling and composting rates, appears to be the provision of widespread separate collection facilities, together with the availability of adequate markets for the materials collected.

Through the COMWASTE project all the aforementioned issues will be confronted by developing and implementing an innovative system for separate collection and composting at source in the Attica region of Athens - Greece.

The project perfectly matches the overall targets of Greece on waste prevention and increased recycling since the project is expected to demonstrate and document the separate collection and composting at source and can lead to significant reduction in the quantity of waste going to final disposal. The main technical and scientific coordinator of the project is NTUA while three Municipalities of Attica region are quite involved in the project: Municipality of Kifissia, Municipality of Nea Halkidona and Municipality of Acharnes. The project is being carried out in an appropriate pilot scale in order to demonstrate and document the feasibility of separate collection and composting at source. It consists of 8 tasks and it will last 27 months.