Taste your waste or „Our waste – our problem“ was our first youth exchange we organized as Czekobanda. It took place in Brno in the spring 2007. It was a multilateral project where 37 participants from seven EU countries met (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden).

The main idea was to bring the awareness of the participants and local community towards the waste treatment as an important part of environmental friendly lifestyle. Most people stop thinking and forget about their household waste at the moment of throwing it into the basket. We started our investigation at this point. We discovered what was happening with our waste after being thrown into the garbage bin.

We found out and compared how the waste is treated in participating countries. We visited different waste treatment facilities such as landfill, incinerator, recycling and composting facility and learned about various possibilities of waste treatment (reusing, sorting, recycling, dumping, burning).

In the second part of the exchange we shared our knowledge and brought awareness about waste treatment politics to local community. We organized an exhibition at the Faculty of Social Studies were our participants explained how the waste is treated in their countries. In the evening we organized a public event with concerts for university students. It was another more informal space for continuing discussions.

This exchange had a huge impact on many people. Some of the participants focused on waste treatment politics in their studies. Lot of following projects were developed after this exchange (e.g. „Back to nature“ – Youth exchange in Poland, „SOS – Spirit of Sport“ – Youth exchange in Hungary,Bare Feet – Open Mind – Czekobanda’s second youth exchange).