The FORWAST project intends to provide comprehensive and validated data on the material flows, stocks and environmental pressures coming from the different sectors of the life cycle of resources to waste. In the wider context of sustainable development and environment protection, the connections between the use of natural resources, their accumulation in economy and waste generation and management need to be more clearly understood. 

Waste management policies may affect potentially all sectors. Their influence on the use of natural resources must also account for the potential recovery of these resources from stocks, the technical and economical constraints of recycling, the side effects on the by-products associated with natural resources, and at the end, the global balance of the environmental costs and benefits.

The current uncertainties on the environmental stakes of waste policies are pre-dominantly due to a lack of real physical data on the quantities and qualities of flows of resources, either natural or coming from waste recovery. Particularly important for the latter is to account for the actual stocks of these resources that will end-up in the waste flows in the future. The objectives of the proposed FORWAST project are therefore to:
 

	Provide an inventory of the historically cumulated physical stock of materials in EU-27 (EU-25 plus Romania and Bulgaria), and to forecast the expected amounts of waste generated, per resource category, in the next 25 years.
	Provide an assessment of the life-cycle wide environmental impacts from different scenarios of waste prevention, recycling and waste treatment in the EU-27.

With this STREP proposal, sound experiences on resources and waste management are combined in order to give direct decision and policy support. The partnership experience is mainly characterised by:.

	European and National experience in policy support;
	The access to data from various countries (particularly East and South);
	Availability of a successfully applied assessment tool (NAMEA, MFA), along with more insight in processes for various waste streams (AWAST simulator);
	An extensive network in resources and waste management.