IMPACT Furniture is part of Oxfam Belgium. Through its Upcycle Your Office project, it is in the process of developing a catalogue of upcycled office furniture.
The plywood panels are recovered from old office furniture thrown away by local businesses and organisations and subsequently used as a raw material for making new furniture items.
The profits are ploughed back into Oxfam Belgium and help finance projects to fight poverty.
The Italian Cartiera is an ethical fashion workshop founded in Lama di Reno, Marzabotto, in 2017 which makes leather and fabric items.
Believing strongly that work is an extraordinary tool for social inclusion, Cartiera offers paths for employment and integration of disadvantaged people, mainly refugees and asylum seekers.
Atelier Riforma started as a social economy startup with a pioneer marketplace for upcycled garments. Realising that the sorting and cataloguing of textile waste were too labour-intensive for industry standards, founders came up with the idea of developing an AI-based automated solution - called Re4circular - to create a digitized and truly efficient post-consumer clothing supply chain.
The URBIOFIN project aimed to demonstrate the techno-economic and environmental viability of an integrated and innovative biorefinery for the transformation of the organic fraction of municipal solid wasteinto new marketable bioproducts, chemical building blocks, biopolymers and additives for different markets like agriculture and cosmetics.
Two European companies, polyamide supplier Domo and polymer manufacturer Covestro, are collaborating with Dutch technology startup Circularise to create a system for tracking plastics.
CuanTec is a Scottish blue biotech company that replaces plastic with natural alternatives. Sourced from waters of the Atlantic, CuanTec takes waste from fisheries and obtains the natural biopolymer chitin. Their process uses biology rather than chemistry to create chitin and chitosan of high quality and purity, which are in demand for over 3,000 industrial uses around the world.
This year took place the third The World Circular Economy Forum (WCEF), beginning Monday 3rd June in Helsinki, Finland. The Forum is organised by SITRA, the Finnish Innovation Fund.
NAFIGATE’s Hydal Biotechnology uses waste cooking oil to produce a fully biodegradable and biocompatible PHA biopolymer named Hydal (Polyhydroxyalcanoates). This is the first biopolymer of its kind being produced on an industrial scale at an affordable price.
