While welcoming the EU’s recognition of the circular economy’s transformative potential for the EU economy, RREUSE expressed concern about the current narrow focus on recycling and the lack of ambition to promote waste prevention and reuse.

Its recommendations are as follows:

Establish a right to reuse:

• Set binding separate targets for (preparing for) reuse;
• Set EPR fees in line with the waste hierarchy;
• Ensure full cost coverage of (preparing for) reuse activities;
• Prioritise reuse in future criteria for circular public procurement.

Unlock the full potential of social circular enterprises:

• Guarantee social enterprises’ access to waste streams and collection points, as well as ownership of collected materials;
• Allocate earmarked EPR funding for social enterprises;
• Apply zero VAT rates

Greening metals and minerals production, including CRMs, comes with higher capital and operating costs – a 'green premium'. This reflects investment in decarbonising production processes, ensuring robust environmental and social safeguards and advancing circularity.

Manufacturers appear hesitant to absorb such premia and a credible green-premium market for CRMs is unlikely to emerge without regulatory intervention.

This analysis has laid out a phased, two-tier pathway towards a premium market. The first tier would focus on setting minimum market-access requirements, in order to level the playing field and exclude the worst performers from EU market access. A second tier of instruments is therefore needed to reward those who exceed baseline standards through targeted, conditional incentives.

Academics for Circular Economy welcomes the creation of a Circular Economy Act that aims to address issues such as resource dependence, competitiveness, and environmental pressures. To leverage the full economic, social and environmental potential of the circular economy, the Circular Economy Act must address a number of critical points:

• Competitiveness through upstream innovation
• European resource independence by design
• Resilience of the single market
• Environmental protection via a regenerative bioeconomy
• Innovation driven by research and development

The BioBoosters hackathon model has brought together innovators who have come up with workable solutions for a wide range of challenges in the bioeconomy sector. The programme is coming to an end, and this report sets out how the project connected regional innovation systems across the Baltic Sea Region to a joint open innovation platform tackling business-driven circular transition challenges.

It explores the relevance, efficiency, impact and sustainability of the hackathon model and the inter-regional cooperation dimension.

The analysis is based on data and feedback from 18 challenge provider companies, nearly 100 mentored teams and over 500 connected industry and research specialists. It looks at what makes this hackathon model impactful and the added value of an international network.

BioBoosters is a bioeconomy business accelerator. It runs a business-driven hackathon concept to boost the circular transition of the bioeconomy sector. 

The hackathon concept is simple: identify a problem and bring innovators around the table to find a solution. For instance, hemp production in Estonia is flourishing – but the company growing it had no viable use for the stalks. The innovators explored options such as hemp-based filament for 3D printing, hemp as a substrate for mushroom cultivation for biodegradable packaging and extracting enzymes from hemp via fermentation-based processes.

This report covers another eight hackathons, tackling logistics, wood, activated carbon, wine corks, soil health and apples.