Circular Economy in Malta: A Guide for Erasmus+ Students
An Erasmus+ mobility changes more than a CV. Living in another country means adopting new routines; where you shop, how you cook, what you throw away and where it goes. For a few weeks or months, participants become temporary residents of a place with its own systems and its own environmental pressures.
Malta is a particularly interesting place to have that experience. It is small, densely populated, imports most of what it consumes, and has limited space for what it discards. Every choice about consumption and waste is visible here in a way it rarely is in a larger country.
This is the starting point of Circular Harvest, an initiative developed by Lexema within Erasmus+ project 2025-1-MT01-KA122-ADU-000340998.
What the circular economy actually means
Most of the economy still works in a straight line: take resources, make products, use them, throw them away. The circular economy replaces that line with a loop, keeping products and materials in use for as long as possible before anything is discarded.
In practice it comes down to five actions, in order of impact:
Rethink — question whether something is needed at all
Reduce — consume less, and waste less of what is consumed
Reuse — give products a second life instead of buying new
Repair — fix before replacing
Recycle — dispose correctly when nothing else is possible
The order matters, and it is the part most people get wrong. Recycling sits at the bottom of the list, not the top. It is what happens when the first four have already failed. A product that is never bought has a far greater impact than one that is bought and correctly recycled.
Why circular economy matters in Malta
Malta faces one of the sharpest versions of this challenge in Europe.
According to Eurostat, Malta recycled around 17% of its municipal waste in 2023 — one of the five lowest rates in the European Union, against an EU average of 45%. At the same time, the country generates more waste per person than most: 621kg per capita in 2024, compared with an EU-27 average of 517 kg, according to the European Environment Agency. Most of what is not recycled goes to landfill, on an island where land is the scarcest resource there is.
Malta's Long-Term Waste Management Plan 2021–2030 sets out a national transition towards a circular model. But national plans work through daily behaviour, and a significant share of that behaviour belongs to people who are not Maltese residents — tourists, seasonal workers, language students and Erasmus+ participants, all living in apartments and generating household waste for weeks at a time.
That makes Erasmus+ participants part of the picture, not observers of it.
How waste separation works in Malta
Malta uses a door-to-door collection system rather than street containers.
Recyclable packaging, paper and cardboard, metal and plastic is collected together, in the same bag, once a week. Glass is collected separately, roughly twice a month.
Organic waste has been collected door-to-door since 2018.
Mixed waste goes in the black bag.
Larger items and textiles can be taken to civic amenity sites.
What an Erasmus+ mobility has to do with habits
Habits are hard to change at home because home is where they were formed.
Everything is automatic: the same supermarket, the same routine, the same bin.
A mobility breaks that automation. For a short period, every daily decision is made consciously rather than by reflex.
That window is unusually good for forming new habits, and it is the reason a sustainability message can land during a mobility when it would be ignored at home. It is also why the effect does not stay in Malta: participants take the habits back with them, into households and classrooms in their own countries. A local initiative ends up with a European reach, not because it was designed to, but because the participants travel.
From research to a guide, and from a guide to a brochure
Circular Harvest did not begin as a communication project. It began with Lexema staff taking part in job shadowing and training course mobilities, learning approaches and techniques from organisations abroad.
What followed was a research phase on the circular economy — its principles and how the concept is framed at European level — which produced a comprehensive Circular Economy Guide.
And then the project ran into its most useful problem.
The guide was thorough. It was also, for the audience it was meant to reach, too long. Students arriving in Malta for a work placement are not going to read a document about European policy frameworks. The team had produced good information in a format that would not be used.
More information does not mean more impact. Often it means less.
So Lexema built a second resource: a simplified Circular Economy Brochure, distributed to participants hosted in Malta. Short, concrete, and built entirely around decisions a student actually makes — what to buy, what to reuse, which bag to use on which day.
The two resources now work as a pair. The guide provides depth and context, and will be published as an open-source resource on the Lexema website. The brochure does the practical work, in the hands of the people who need it.
What Circular Harvest says about Erasmus+
There is a version of Erasmus+ that ends when the mobility ends. Participants come home, the certificates go in a drawer, and the organisation moves on to the next group.
Circular Harvest is what the other version looks like. Staff went abroad to learn. The learning became research, the research became a resource, and the resource now reaches hundreds of students who were never part of the original mobility — and who will carry it into countries the project never visited.
That is the part worth taking from this project, whatever your organisation works on. The measure of a mobility is not what participants experience during it. It is what still exists afterwards.
Start small. Think circular. 🌱
Notes:
17.3% recycling rate, 2023, and EU average 43.3% → Eurostat, Municipal waste statistics
618 kg per capita, 2022, vs EU-27 average 513 kg → European Environment Agency, Malta municipal waste factsheet, 2025
DISCLAIMER: Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or EUPA. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
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