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.

In March 2019, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation launched Circular Economy in Cities, a suite of easily accessible resources which provide a global reference on the topic.

Its modules have been developed to respond to the growing interest in circular economy from city governments and mayors, and will offer insights to many other urban stakeholders, including the people who live in cities.

Circular Economy in Cities focuses on opportunities in three key urban systems - buildings, mobility, and products - and looks at how city governments can work to enable a circular economy transition.

The project addresses questions such as:

1. Vision: What will the implementation of circular economy principles in cities look like?
2. Factsheets: What benefits can a circular economy transition in key urban systems bring to cities?
3. Policy levers: What can urban policymakers do to accelerate this transition?
4. Case studies: What examples are there of urban policymakers already putting this into action?
5. Other networks & resources: What are other organisations doing on the topic of circular economy and cities?

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.

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.

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