The information campaign is implemented as part of the municipality's participation in the TRIFOCAL London project

We throw away over 670,000 tons of food a year - this fact has led us to join the campaign for sensible shopping and reduction of food waste. Ten European cities, including London, Brussels, Sofia, Barcelona, Oslo and Milan, joined the campaign under the auspices of the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. That said the Mayor of Sofia, Yordanka Fandakova when announcing the project, combined with dinner with "rescued" food.

Laura and Stoyan from the Bon Apeti show prepared the dinner. Credo Bonum Foundation and BILLA stores are campaign partners. Vlado Nikolov, the captain of the national volleyball team, coach of hundreds of children and father of four, has accepted to be part of the information campaign.

Apart from shopping wisely, it is important to know how to store food and how to use leftovers.

Since 2014, all bio-waste - food from restaurants, municipal kindergartens, markets, retail chains, and green waste - branches, leaves, grass - are collected separately and processed. Installations for green and bio-waste are part of the waste processing plant. In 2017, almost 14 000 t of green waste and over 8 500 t of food waste were collected separately and processed. 2 109MWh of electricity and 8876 t of compost were produced from them and 21 t of compost were supplied free of charge to the citizens who have paid their household waste tax.

Since 2015, Sofia has a waste treatment plant, which processes all household waste that each of us discards. Last year in the plant were processed over 356000 t. Paper, plastic, metals and glass are removed from the mixed waste and recycled. In 2017, more than 12 500 t of materials were recycled and 61000 t of Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF) were produced.

Mayor Fandakova pointed out that our main goal is to turn waste into a resource, and that is already happening. Only 10 years ago, Sofia deposited 100% of its waste. Today, we deposit only 17%. This is a tremendous progress that is not visible in our daily lives, but which has an extremely strong impact on the environment.

Sofia Municipality has launched an information campaign to promote the reduction of food waste. The information campaign is implemented as a part of the partnership commitment of Sofia Municipality in the project TRiFOCAL London (Transforming City FOod hAbits for Life), coordinated by Resource London, established in partnership between WRAP and LWARB - together with Groundwork London. TRiFOCAL is funded by the LIFE Programme of the European Union, Project Number LIFE15 / GIE / UK / 000867.

Beneficiary of the European Commission's LIFE Program is the organization London Waste and Recycling Board (LWARB), headed by the Mayor of London in partnership with the charities Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) and Groundwork London, and is implementing the Transforming city food habits for life (TRiFOCAL) project. Performing the tasks set out in the TRiFOCAL project, the LWARB team has involved 10 supporting European cities to share their experience in conducting information campaigns aimed at reducing food waste by engaging citizens and changing their consumer habits.