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.
The built environment accounts for at least 40% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. For the Alps, it is key to use local resources effectively while upholding EU rules and promoting the adoption of common standards across the building value chain.
The European Interreg Alpine Space project BAUHALPS is endeavouring to meet these challenges by developing and testing a model that combines New European Bauhaus concepts with sustainability measurements and indicators in an innovative way.
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.
INN-PRESSME is a consortium of 27 partners from nine countries helping European SMEs and companies develop bio-based solutions in the packaging, energy, transport and consumer goods sectors.
The project will shortly be holding its final event, bringing together investors, industry, policy makers, clusters, universities and research centres. It will be an opportunity to discuss the project results, technologies, market services and lessons learned, focusing on the innovativetest cases.
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.
