The project
Waste in Progress was born from a very specific need Spora identified in its day-to-day work with local administrations: knowing what other cities and territories are doing to tackle the same challenges, and understanding how far these experiences can be adapted to our own reality.
In a constantly changing sector, administrations need to make decisions about collection models, taxation, technology, prevention, identification systems, procurement and service monitoring. But the most advanced reference points are often found outside our immediate context.
Out of this need, Waste in Progress was born in 2017, conceived and driven by Spora as a knowledge-transfer space that brings international, national and Catalan experiences to Girona to analyze them, put them to the test and turn them into learnings applicable to municipal waste management.
Since its first edition, the Forum has kept evolving until becoming a leading national event with international reach.
The challenge
How do we turn experiences from around the world into useful knowledge for local administrations?
This isn’t about looking for models to copy. It’s about building a space to learn from others’ experience in order to make better decisions of your own.
That’s why every edition starts from a real question facing the sector and devotes the whole program to exploring it from different angles: technical, economic, legal, operational and political.
The approach
From success story to informed decision. Spora conceptualizes Waste in Progress as a highly specialized forum, built around a single major challenge per edition.
From there, the work begins long before the congress doors open: identifying the issue that will set the sector’s agenda, researching experiences, finding the territories and professionals who can add the most value, and building a narrative able to organize all this knowledge.
The result is a forum that not only explains what is happening, but tries to anticipate what the sector will need to solve next.
Methodology
Search, select, test and share.
Each edition is built through a process of curation and knowledge transfer:
- Detecting emerging challenges, based on Spora’s ongoing contact with administrations and sector professionals.
- International research on reference cases, identifying cities, regions, organizations and projects that have already tackled these challenges.
- Analysis and selection of cases, prioritizing experiences able to provide data, learnings and comparable elements.
- Building the program, ordering content so each day progresses from context toward the most operational questions.
- Diversifying formats, combining talks, case studies, panel discussions, and spaces for debate and participation.
- Connecting with the market, incorporating a professional area where companies and suppliers can present solutions linked to the challenges covered.
- Communication and community, generating content before, during and after the event to extend its reach beyond attendees.
A forum that evolves with the sector
One of Waste in Progress’s strengths is that the format isn’t static. Each edition incorporates learnings from the previous one and adapts its content, spaces and dynamics to the needs of the moment.
This capacity to evolve keeps the project useful: it doesn’t replicate a formula; it constantly revisits which questions the sector needs answered.
Results
From shared need to knowledge community.
Since 2017, Waste in Progress has built a solid community of public administrations, companies, technical staff and professionals specialising in municipal waste management.
The first edition brought together 410 administrations and 21 specialised companies. In later editions, the Forum has exceeded 1,500 visitors, more than 500 administrations and around twenty exhibitors, and in 2025 it grew in exhibitors and expanded its activity across the Palau de Fires and the Auditori-Palau de Congressos de Girona.
Over the editions, more than 50 international cases have been presented at the Forum, with experiences from places and organisations such as San Francisco, Milan, Seoul, Copenhagen, Stockholm, the Giro d’Italia and The Walt Disney Company.
Industry media now describe Waste in Progress as a leading international forum and an established space for analysing new models of municipal waste management.
But the project’s main achievement is not just having grown a conference. It is having built a stable space where the sector can share experience, pool knowledge and accelerate learning that each administration would otherwise have to face alone.
Lessons learned
Knowledge is more useful when it helps you decide.
Waste in Progress was born from a conviction that still holds true after seven editions: administrations don’t just need more information. They need better knowledge: contextualised, verified, explaining both successes and difficulties, allowing them to ask questions directly to those who have already gone through the same process and, above all, knowledge that can be turned into decisions.
The project has confirmed to us that knowledge transfer is most powerful when it goes beyond presenting success stories and creates spaces to analyse them, question them, compare them and imagine how they can be adapted to other contexts.
This is the role of Waste in Progress: giving territories the knowledge they need to decide better how they want to move forward.