This report is published by the Cyprus Federation of Employers & Industrialists (OEB), the Institute of Greek Tourism Confederation (INSETE) and the public policy consultancy adelphi (Germany) as part of the European project Hotels4Climate financed by EUKI.

The report aims to assess the current state of circularity in the hotel industry in Cyprus and Greece by conducting national surveys in both countries targeting hotels in order to:

• identify the priority sectors within the main services offered by hotels, the business challenges and opportunities to move to circular economy,
• create successful, flexible and resilient circular business models, and
• identify a number of internal and external barriers that raise obstacles to the transition to circular economy.

The circular economy is an alternative to the dominant economic model, which causes considerable damage to the environment as it is based on the linear use of resources.

The development of the circular economy has been hindered by a number of economic, technological and regulatory constraints.

EpE's natural resources commission has spent three years identifying what makes circular economy initiatives successful. An analysis of 27 circular economy initiatives carried out by companies shows that partnerships are one key to overcoming these constraints. A closer examination of these partnerships sheds light on various forms of governance.

This report connects the potential for resource efficiency, via circular economy and the value-retention processes (VRPs), with a policy-relevant lens. It is one of the first to quantify the current-state and potential impacts associated with the inclusion of VRPs within industrial economic systems.

In order to do that the assessment applies the different VRPs to a series of products within three industrial sectors and quantifies benefits in relation to the original manufactured product, such as the material requirement, the energy used, the waste as well as the costs and the generation of jobs.

The report also highlights the systemic barriers that may inhibit progressive scale-up including regulatory, market, technology and infrastructure barriers, and how they could be overcome.

Textiles are an important issue for cities, as people generate more and more textile waste. City authorities are required to provide for separate collection of used textiles but have limited ways of putting the waste generated to good use.

Eurocities’ paper on circular textiles is published ahead of the Commission's new Strategy for Sustainable Textiles, planned for autumn 2021, to help the EU shift to a climate-neutral, circular economy (CE) where products are designed to be more durable, reusable, repairable, recyclable and energy-efficient. It focuses on a sustainable recovery of the textile sector from the Covid-19 crisis by:

• making it more competitive,
• applying CE principles to production, waste management, etc.
• and directing investment, research and innovation.

The transition to a circular economy is at an early stage in the EU.

Regulations, markets and investment tools, including financial risk assessment, are adapted to linear models. Generally speaking, externalities linked to linear business models are not taken into account. This poses a problem for emerging circular models, which have to contend with the challenge of accessing finance, as the financial sector sees circular projects as highly risky.

To improve the conditions for financing CE projects, the Expert Group on Circular Economy Financing identified the main areas where incentives are needed, addressing recommendations to policy makers, financial institutions and project promoters.

See also: Categorisation system and Incentives to boost the CE reports

Over the past decades concepts such as sustainability and industrial development have slowly come to the same operational logic, as demonstrated by a growing interest in exploring and describing the synergy between developments in the circular economy and industrial digitalisation. There is agreement on their complementarity evolution paths, but no outlook is available regarding the co-evolution staging and structuring. This paper based on desk and empirical research presents an approach to outline the likely path of evolution.

So far, the notion of transition to sustainability has been applied in single sector studies, while reality indicates that the systemic change required cuts across thematic technologies and sectors. The approach taken can be useful to enrich current analyses.