Relationship between prevention of waste and zero waste movement

Climate change, the population of the earth, consumption, decrease of natural resources are the factors that force the search for the most effective environmental solutions. Waste prevention and management policies focus on finding solutions that deliver real results in reducing resource use and avoiding environmental pollution by waste. EU waste prevention and management policy is based on a ranking of priorities: prevention; preparing for re-use; recycling; other recovery, e.g. energy recovery; and disposal. The article aims to reveal the content of waste prevention and its main features. The analysis of legal regulation and national waste prevention policy showed the state's priority tasks in the field of waste prevention. The article briefly discusses the Zero Waste movement, which has been known in some countries for more than a decade and has recently becoming increasingly popular in Lithuania. The article raises the question of whether waste prevention and Zero Waste are the same. Have national regulations and waste prevention and management policies not been stuck in the framework of long-term strategies and are friendly to new ideas? The article concludes that the Zero waste movement in Lithuania can be considered a social phenomenon for the time being, which has no legal basis to consider it as an official part of waste prevention. Despite the lack of state attention to the Zero Waste movement, its objectives clearly coincide with those of waste prevention.