European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform

Are there limits to robustness in our socio-economic metabolism? And is 100% circularity rate in the EU27 theoretically possible? Can we use principles and indicators from regenerative economics to develop (rather than just grow) regenerative circular economies?

These aspects are being discussed together with Dr. Dominika Alexa Teigiserova, assistant prof. Dr. Daan Schraven, prof. Martin de Jong, prof. Xin Tong, and prof. Bob Ulanowicz in the paper entitled: Are there limits to robustness? Exploring tools from regenerative economics for a balanced transition towards a circular EU27.

This peer reviewed paper is open access and published in the special issue "Sustainable Cities in the Context of Economic Transformation and Climate Change" of the Cleaner Production Letters journal.

The conference Towards a Circular Economy: Competences for Youth aimed to enable participants from different backgrounds to learn more about the outputs from the Circular Economy - Sustainable Competences for Youth (CESCY) project, to share their views and to hear from experts from different sectors.

The worsening climate crisis and the growing scarcity of natural resources have increasingly demonstrated the limits of our predominantly linear economy. There is no question that our business models and practices must become more sustainable and circular. It is therefore essential that young people be prepared to contribute and lead the way towards a more circular economy in Europe and beyond.

Small Scale Actions (SSA) are a new element introduced for this round of URBACT action planning networks (2019-2022). This compendium summarises all of the SSAs carried out within the Resourceful Cities Network. It aims to support and inspire other cities which want to accelerate their circular transition.

A wide range of SSAs were carried out by Resourceful Cities partners, each one responding to an identified need within the individual city context. Actions included promoting citizen engagement and participation, enhancing knowledge and raising awareness of the circular economy, business support, data collection and monitoring and trialling new business models.

Urban agriculture comes with its own share of environmental impacts. Circular strategies promise to reduce these impacts, but not all strategies are resource efficient and environmentally effective.

This paper finds that the most eco-friendly and circular strategies for urban agriculture, taking a Mediterranean tomato crop as a case study, include:

• Struvite (phosphate mineral recovered from wastewater treatment) instead of non-renewable phosphate fertiliser to conserve freshwater
• Recycled steel and materials for urban agricultural infrastructure to reduce carbon emissions, toxicity and freshwater pollution
• Closed-loop irrigation to minimise ocean and freshwater pollution. However, if new infrastructure is required, it could lead to an increase in carbon emissions.

The circular economy (CE) is gaining momentum in cities. To ensure a sustainable CE, it is crucial to measure the environmental performance of CE strategies. However, environmental assessments overlook several strategies that are a key feature of urban CE practice. These include reuse and repair, sustainable built infrastructure and urban land use, green public procurement, smart information and access technology.

To provide insights into the environmental performance and potential of these strategies, industrial ecologists and municipalities should:

• collaborate with urban systems experts
• quantify the environmental impacts of entire urban systems
• combine environmental assessments with social and economic feasibility ones.

This book provides answers on how to govern the transition to a circular economy in different socio-cultural and political contexts.

It is intended to help the global changemakers who are building our circular future. Author Jacqueline Cramer spoke with 20 representatives of circular hotspots worldwide, thoroughly analysed their different contexts and extracted 10 key takeaways. Everyone working on circular initiatives can use these and adapt them to their own socio-cultural and political contexts.

In this book, Jacqueline Cramer shows how network governance can power the circular economy. Network governance is about building a coalition of partners, which all fulfill a specific function in the network and are aligned by so-called transition brokers. By complementing conventional, public governance with this new form of governance, the best of both worlds is created.

Prof. Cramer shares her huge experience of implementing numerous circular initiatives in the Netherlands. As a practitioner and scholar, she has identified ten guiding principles for building circular initiatives, based on network governance. These guidelines can support everyone who wants to start or expedite a circular initiative.

This is a guide to help practitioners in a city government to adopt a more circular approach to public procurement. Public procurement processes differ from one city to another and therefore this guide is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, it provides an overarching framework that should be adapted to the local context and the realities of a city.

Users are not expected to read the guide in full from beginning to end, but rather, once they have read the framework overview, to jump to the section they need by using the menu bar on the left.

Although previous researchers have explored the circular economy practices of different businesses in various contexts, only a few papers have focused on the sustainable preparation and consumption of food in the tourism and hospitality industry. This paper sheds light on case studies from hotels, restaurants and cafés that are located in urban tourism destinations.

This research suggests that catering businesses can implement a number of responsible initiatives by introducing preventive measures and recycling practices to curb food loss and the generation of waste. In conclusion, it finds that there is scope for regulatory authorities and policy makers to encourage hospitality practitioners to minimise food waste.

The authors of the study apply ascendency analysis (a systematic method based on information theory for quantifying the efficiency and resilience of natural ecosystems) at EU level and discuss the implications for urban waste management systems, taking the Netherlands as an example.

They argue that ecological principles can be useful for developing human-made systems. The system is made sufficiently robust to be able to cope with shocks by including a diverse set of stakeholders who provide:

1. resource-use efficiency through specialised know-how in capturing, processing and delivering a range of resources, and
2. resilience by generating multiple paths that allow these vital resources to circulate throughout the urban network at different levels and rates.