Recycled Workshops: Developing Workshops Using Recycled Materials and Recycling for Youth Workers: Recycled Workshops

Recycled Workshops has come to an end. The project ran from February 2024 to June 2025, coordinated by Green Muse together with the European Development Institute in Brussels and Devridaim in Türkiye, under Erasmus+ with the reference 2023-3-DE04-KA210-YOU-000184784.

It started from something we kept noticing in our own work. A workshop that runs for two days can leave behind more material than it uses. Offcuts bought and never touched, packaging opened for one item, prepared kits that nobody needed in that form. Most of it was decided before the workshop even began, at the point of ordering.

What the project produced

A training programme of 48 hours for people who run workshops, built around zero waste practice, the 5R rule, sustainable workshop design and material selection. A workshop kit of 15 tools and guidelines that can be used one at a time. And an online platform holding the outputs, the resource library and an interactive self assessment.

Nothing was published before it was tested. Eighteen people went through the whole programme, first over ten days online and then over six days in person in Rheine. After that each partner ran a shorter version locally, and the material was corrected according to what those sessions showed rather than what we had assumed.

Where it reached

By the end the project had worked directly with hundreds of participants, the platform had passed 3,000 accesses and the material had reached organisations in more than 15 EU countries.

Everything stays online at recycled-workshops.com and remains free to use and to adapt. The licence allows anyone to take it apart and rebuild it for their own context, which is what we would prefer people did with it.

For us the project did not really finish in June. The material is now the basis of the workshops we run locally, and the questions that came up during the pilot are still the ones we work on.