Is your lifestyle good or bad for the environment? After taking this short test by the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, you will receive tailor-made tips. The aim is to help you save time and money and so to improve your quality of life.
The CYCLE 2013-2017 interdisciplinary project, supported by the Research Council of Norway, focused on the food supply chain from both agriculture and marine sectors, with the aim to improve utilisation of raw materials in a bio-economical perspective.
Jerónimo Martins is an international Group based in Portugal with a massive know-how in food distribution. In 2019, it started selling washing up liquid under the Kraft and Ultra Pro brands with bottles made with 100% recycled PET and offering check-out bags made with 80% post-consumer recycled plastic.
Jerónimo Martins, a food retailer operating in Colombia, Portugal and Poland is committed to reducing 50% of the food waste produced in its operations by 2025, compared to 2016.
Rue Rangoli is a French social enterprise that supports social organisations involved in upcycling or zero-waste and the design circular economy, based in Europe, Africa and Asia.
What is the link between old fishing nets and your smartphone? The casing. POPICASE is the new generation of eco-friendly phone cases by a start-up based in Barcelona.
The cleanSpot application provides users with an easy way to search for recycling centres and specialised recycling containers where they can drop off their non conventional urban waste for correct recycling.
Two European companies, polyamide supplier Domo and polymer manufacturer Covestro, are collaborating with Dutch technology startup Circularise to create a system for tracking plastics.
The Circular Prague report is a visual roadmap that identifies the strategies that are best positioned to kick-start the Czech capital’s transition towards a circular economy.
The report marks the culmination of Prague’s Circle City Scan; a 12-month collaborative innovation process involving local government, research organisations and businesses. The collaborative Circle City Scan process has highlighted the potential to promote circular lifestyles in ReUse Hubs using public procurement, to boost the construction through circular procurement, and to use the city’s food waste as biomethane to power the city’s waste collection fleet.
The concept of circular economy is becoming increasingly important in the textile industry. This study examines options for establishing closed fibre cycles in the clothing and fashion industry. It provides a detailed background analysis on fibre cycles in Europe and Germany, describes the biggest drivers and obstacles and evaluates selected technologies for textile fibre recycling.
The analysis is based on an in-depth literature review, paired with findings from a focus group session conducted as part of the Cradle to Cradle (C2C) International Congress 2018. In addition, more than 20 experts working in the textile sector shared their candid views for the analysis.
The study was commissioned by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and financed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
The policy brief discusses Circular Economy Business Models (CBM), gives several examples and considers the challenges and solutions facing policymakers. It makes a number of recommendations to regions to speed up the development of CBMs ‒ something this brief argues regions are in a good position to do ‒ and shares several good practices from Interreg Europe projects. It should be read in conjunction with the Interreg webinar on CBMs webinar on Circular Economy Business Models. It also briefly sketches EU policies in this area and offers some practical funding and networking tips.
In a circular economy, assets are no longer sold. Rather, the assets are collectively maintained by a network of stakeholders involved in the ongoing functioning of the assets - the circular service (CISE) network.
A CISE network however requires unprecedented levels of cooperation and coordination between participants, leading to high administrative costs and the need for trust and transparency in the network. CISE networks are a totally different way of doing business, requiring different financial, legal and governance structures. Would it be possible for assets to be owned and procured by a network that creates value from them? Could this, simultaneously, reduce administrative costs?
Explore how city governments around the world are taking action to enable circular economy opportunities that deliver on a range of mayoral priorities, Sustainable Development Goals, and climate objectives. The EMF has launched Circular Economy in Cities with a global reference on the topic.
Vision: What will the implementation of circular economy principles in cities look like?
Factsheets: What benefits can a circular economy transition in key urban systems bring to cities?
Policy levers: What can urban policymakers do to accelerate this transition?
Case studies: What examples are there of urban policymakers already putting this into action?
Other networks & resources: What are other organisations doing on the topic of circular economy and cities?
The garden, outdoor power and power tools industries have developed a joint position paper on the different principles of the circular economy the industries are already applying.
Given the proximity to nature and to the natural environment, these industries are committed towards protecting the environment and are already taking measures to minimise the life-cycle impact of products in the environment addressing the following issues:
Design of durable and reliable products
Application of material efficiency and hazardous substances substitution
Limiting noise and exhaust emissions
Reparability and extending product lifetime
Integrating recyclability and safe waste management aspects at the design stage
Limiting packaging and its impacts
New business models
More details on the specific measures can be found in the position paper.
Circular economy strategies have been under development in European cities, regions, and countries in the last few years. 33 strategies have been adopted since 2014, and at least 29 more are under development. Existing strategies were reviewed for this study, to identify similarities and differences, and to assess the involvement of civil society organisations, and potential for collaboration.
The study argues that documents developed in the future should put more focus on including broader sections of value chains, and on ensuring inclusive partnership approaches in all phases of the strategy’s cycle. To date, circular economy strategies show different degrees of inclusiveness in terms of value chains and partner involvement. Limited inclusive approaches can be explained by the exploratory nature of most strategy documents. This includes a stronger involvement of civil society organisations in earlier phases of strategy development, and not just for dissemination and citizen involvement.
The study highlights the role of the European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform in gathering and sharing civil society’s knowledge and making sure it is fed into the policy cycle for circular economy.
The opportunities in the reuse and service-life extension of manufactured objects are fairly well documented. But a huge innovation potential lies dormant in the Circular Industrial Economy: the reuse and service-life extension of manufactured molecules.
The latter is under-researched and under-exploited: reusing atoms and molecules in loops of highest purity, instead of recycling mixed wastes, is a challenge which involves chemistry on several levels, including the design of new molecules and mini-mill technologies to de-link existing materials. Innovative non-destructive and non-mixing collection and sorting processes will also need to be developed.
Policy Innovation could close the invisible liability loop, by legislating an Extended Producer Liability.
Every second German manufacturing firm saves material by designing its products resource-efficiently. Although increasing digital networking in complex industrial production processes opens up new opportunities for saving resources, almost half of these firms are not digitalised yet.
This study delivers the first empirical findings on the relevance of digitisation to improving material efficiency based on the German company survey ‘IW-Zukunftspanel’.
German manufacturing firms have up to now only rarely digitised material efficiency measures to a great extent. If they are - particularly in large companies - they tend to be used for process optimisation. Around two fifths of the companies are at least moderately digitised in relation to the most important industrial efficiency measures, namely process optimisation and the use of new techniques, but there is still more than a third that is not at all. Companies have most frequently digitised cross-company materials cycles, but this instrument is only applied by two fifths of industrial companies. There is still potential for more digitisation of measures relating to product design, materials cycle management and new business models.
At least every other manufacturing company reuses residue and waste materials via internal circulation systems. Nevertheless, for two fifths of these companies digital networks do not play any part and in the case of a further two fifths, the part they play is minor. Only one in ten companies is heavily digitised. More than half of industrial companies use resource-saving measures that begin at the product design stage. To date, almost half of these companies are not digitally networked, or if they are, it is only to a small extent. One third of the industrial companies up to now have considered new business models as an efficiency-raising way. Of these, three out of ten have not been digitised yet with a further two fifths having only a minor level of digitisation.
Companies that have already embedded digitisation in their strategy are frontrunners for greater material efficiency, since they more frequently use material efficiency measures intensively, are more likely to recognise further potential savings and their efficiency-saving approaches are also clearly more often highly digitised.
On 17 and 18 February the Lithuanian Innovation Center will hold a webinar on Sustainable Transport and Mobility Solutions with Circular Procurement. It will consist of presentations from public and private sectors including topics like green public procurement, sustainable mobility and transport innovation.
The Joint Initiative on Circular Economy (JICE) organises a webinar on 1 March 2021 on moving towards a more circular model on textiles. Registrations are open!
Join the Finnish innovation Fund Sitra, the European Environment Agency and the European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform to discuss how to create a level playing field for circular businesses and how to enable a transition to a circular economy through incentives that promote circularity. Rendez-vous on 25 March (13:00 to 14:30 CET).
How can the choice of the "best offer" enable the development of the circular economy? What is the state of regulation? Which obstacles to be unblocked can still be identified? Follow the webinar on Le mieux-disant au service de l’économie circulaire - i. e. the choice of the "best offer" to the benefit of the circular economy - on 4 February 2021.
The Metropolis of Greater Paris, INEC, ObsAR and Les Canaux are launching their support programme, the Circular and Social Purchases Programme, at a webinar on 3 February 2021 from 10.30 a.m. to 12 noon.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has set out five universal circular economy policy goals that provide a framework for national governments, cities and businesses to create a transition that fosters innovation and decouples growth from finite resource consumption and environmental degradation.
On 26 January 2021 Circle Economy will launch its annual Circularity Gap Report during the Virtual Davos Agenda Week hosted by the World Economic Forum.
The secretariat of the Sustainable, Long-term Investments & Competitive European Industry Intergroup has the pleasure to invite you to its first event of the year, Protecting the competitiveness of low carbon and circular industries in Europe: the case of Aluminium, a webinar on 26 January 2021.
On 28 January C2C will host its digital C2C Summit: Textiles & Supply Chain, focusing on Cradle to Cradle cycles and material health in the textile industry.
On 10 February, ACLIMA, ATI, EASME, DG GROW and ECESP organisedthe policy seminar on circular economy and advanced technology/digital policies. The panel discussed the ways industrial recovery policies realise a green, climate-resilient economy in the short and long terms, and how digital transformation respects the environment.
The Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy (PACE) aims to enable greater cooperation among public and private-sector organizations to close the production-consumption loop.
Less than a tenth of the billions of tonnes of resources pumped into the global economy every year are reused, and this waste incurs a huge economic, environmental, and social cost.
