Waste prevention is interdisciplinary. Our research group at the University of Campinas is an initiative to assist society, local governments, and industry in reducing waste, maximising their resources, and decreasing their environmental impacts. Our group is based at the School of Civil Engineering, Architecture and Urban Design, established in 2015.

We are an interdisciplinary group with members from different scientific knowledge areas: civil engineering, food engineering, urban planning, chemistry, and environmental psychology. We aim to generate new ideas and relevant outputs to become part of mainstream waste management thinking, nationally and internationally. Moreover, it provided fundamental data, models, theories, and exemplar studies to enable the move toward enhanced resource management. Our activities are focused on implementing new ideas and technologies based on fundamental research (e.g., waste treatment, environmental impacts, behaviour change) and optimising existing technologies/operations (e.g., waste prevention, energy recovery, waste logistics).

We focus on industrial, agricultural, commercial, and urban waste; we are not limited to studying only municipal waste. Some of our studies apply engineering and management technologies to increase energy recovery from organic waste. Other researchers take the concept of pro-environmental behaviour and analyse its structure in depth in different contexts using computer models to improve waste prevention policies. Further studies have been developed to understand the water-energy-food nexus concerning sustainable cities.