Up2Circ (Boosting the uptake of circular business model, product and process innovation) is an international project funded by the Horizon Europe programme which aims to accelerate and scale up the transition of European SMEs towards a circular economy.
Resources without identity become waste, and this issue must be tackled in order to foster the circular economy. This webinar will discuss methods for assigning appropriate information to goods, tracking them and then processing and transfering this data efficiently, using state-of-the-art technologies such as AI, visual tracking systems, the Internet of Things and common communication languages.
Berlin began its circular economy transition in 2020 with the adoption of the Waste Management Concept 2020-2030, aiming to implement measures to reduce household, water and construction waste. To advance this transition, it established the Coordination Office for Circular Economy, Energy Efficiency and Climate Protection in Business in 2022 and the Zero Waste Agency in 2023, and commissioned a study to analyse the circular economy’s potential in the industrial sector.
Despite these efforts, the circular economy in Berlin is still often perceived only in terms of sustainable waste management. This paper looks at challenges holding back progress on the circular economy, including policy coherence, and provides recommendations to accelerate the transition.
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.
With demand for lithium-ion batteries increasing worldwide, developing a solid understanding of the environmental and social impacts associated with how they are used is becoming increasingly important.
This eventaims to discuss where we stand in terms of assessing the environmental and social impacts associated with lithium-ion batteries.
How many plastic bottles actually enter the recycling process?
Theory is one thing and reality tends to be another. The Czech Ministry of the Environment wanted to find out what really happens to plastic bottles after they are thrown into sorted bins for plastic waste. It commissioned Adastra to carry out a project using IoT technology to track the movement of sorted bottles.
SUM 2025, the 8th Multidisciplinary Symposium on Circular Economy and Urban Mining, will take place on 21 to 23 May 2025 on the island of Procida.
The event aims to promote continuous interaction (discussion, collaboration, exchange of experiences, etc.) across disciplines, involving any science-based stakeholders or entities.
The Call for Papers is now open! Authors interested in presenting their work at SUM 2025 are invited to submit their papers on the 25 symposium topics, which range from energy and circular economy to contaminants from circular economy in the environment.
Multilayer packaging, often based on PET and polyolefins, presents significant challenges for recycling due to its complex structure. The EU Horizon project MERLIN has focused on developing cost-efficient and high-performance solutions for sorting, delaminating and recycling multilayer packaging materials.
As the project draws to an end, policymakers, waste management professionals, packaging manufacturers or researchers involved in plastic recycling and circular economy initiatives are invited to take stock of the project's findings.
This report is part of a larger, collaborative four-year research project. It analyses the fashion value chain from a global and local perspective with an emphasis on India, Spain and the Netherlands, using a novel framework to assess social impact for circular economy called the SIAF-CE.
The report concludes that the Dutch circular ambition in policy is high and a solid ecosystem is in place. The most established circular strategies are resale and recycling, while promising ones are resale-platform-based, rental and repair. However, the social impact of most circular strategies seems to emulate linear value chain working conditions, where women workers hold the most vulnerable jobs, with low pay, short-term contracts and lower collective bargaining.
Businesses in Spain and around the world are adopting the circular economy as a new production paradigm. However, while the economic and environmental dimensions of the circular economy have been explored, its social impact (decent pay, gender equality, labour conditions) has been overlooked.
By surveying more than 210 workers in three countries and interviewing 90 stakeholders in Spain, the authors developed an inventory of circular jobs. They found that circular jobs in Spain follow the same pattern as the linear value chain, where women in resale, repair and recycling are the most vulnerable. Startups in resale and rental based on internet platform models have the highest earning quality but also high job insecurity, especially for women workers.
