The Western Balkans need to boost their capacity to implement circular economy concepts and practices that go beyond waste management. The CSCP, VITO and the European Environment Agency accordingly launched the Capacity Building on Circular Economy in the Western Balkans project.
RE-ZIP is an innovative, circular packaging solution designed to reduce waste in e-commerce. It provides reusable packaging options that replace traditional single-use packaging, helping e-commerce businesses lower their environmental impact.
Revivack has set up the world's first system based on blockchain technology that facilitates the individual return of unwanted items to the manufacturer. These items can therefore be recovered in an orderly, transparent and reliable way, contributing to the promotion of the circular economy.
The Horizon Europe project CHEERS is a new biorefinery concept. It takes underutilised or waste secondary streams (such as bagasse, wastewater, CO2 and CH4) from the brewery industry, processes them in biorefineries and converts them into innovative bio-based products.
It produces bioproducts for industrial applications: insect protein, disinfectant, microbial protein, ectoine and caproic acid.
EIT Climate-KIC is Europe’s leading climate innovation agency and community, supporting cities, regions, countries and industries as they work to meet their climate ambitions through systems innovation and place-based transformations.
Anna Brassa is part of EIT Climate-KIC's leadership team as a Deep Demonstrations Teams Orchestrator. The Deep Demonstrations project, launched in 2019, serves as a testbed for large-scale, place-based demonstrations of sustainable, regenerative living. She also oversees the work performed by Climate-KIC with the Government of Slovenia on the Deep Demonstration of a Circular, Regenerative and Low-Carbon Economy in Slovenia, developing pathways for a more radical transition to climate neutrality through a circular economy, using a systems innovation approach.
The LOOP-Ports project ran from September 2018 to November 2020. It was coordinated by Fundación Valenciaport and funded by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) through the EIT Climate-KIC initiative. Its main goal was to facilitate the transition to a more circular economy in the port sector.
Sustainable Estimatics is a carbon tracking tool, intended to help the insurance industry manage new environmental, social and governance (ESG) regulations and become greener and less wasteful.
It empowers insurers to quantify and mitigate the carbon dioxide equivalent emissions associated with their entire car insurance claims process. As regards the circular dimension, it enables insurers to compare the environmental impact of repairing car parts versus replacing them.
From its base in the northern Netherlands, JC-Electronics supplies new, refurbished and repaired industrial electronics. By giving used and defective devices a second life, the company contributes to the circular economy and helps customers reduce their carbon footprint.
Ms Ettinger is a lawyer in Germany and holds a Master of Law degree from George Mason University (USA). Before joining EuRIC, she worked at a Brussels-based consultancy, advising multinational companies on environmental, health and safety matters.
EuRIC is a confederation which represents the interests of European recycling industries within the EU. It spans the majority of waste streams, and so can facilitate cooperation between national recycling and resource management federations and companies from over 23 European countries, operating both locally and globally.
EuRIC represents:
5 500+ companies generating an aggregated annual turnover of about €95 billion, including large companies and SMEs involved in the recycling of and trade in various resource streams
300 000 local jobs which cannot be outsourced to non-EU countries
a million tons of waste recycled each year (metals, paper, glass, plastics, WEEE, ELVs, tyres, textiles, construction & demolition, etc.).
By turning waste into resources, recycling loops recycled materials back into value chains. Recyclers play a key role in bridging resource efficiency, climate change policy and the industrial transition.
Gees Recycling's "Retracking" project aims to help lay the groundwork for moving the fibreglass manufacturing sector from a linear to a circular economy by proposing a circular model able to produce a secondary raw material from fibre-reinforced composite waste.
