Circular Gothenburg focuses on resource efficiency to reduce climate change and achieve circular material flows.
It has three target groups: citizens, city departments and businesses. For all three target groups, the goal is to make it simple, straightforward and attractive to participate in transformational circular work. This includes the municipality’s in-house processes and activities which help people to live in a more circular way. One of these activities is the Fixotek: staffed facilities, close to where people live and open to everyone, where people can meet, learn, repair and redesign products, borrow tools and swap toys, clothes and books.
The City of Helsinki has coordinated a project on the reuse of excavated soil in construction projects across the city. This project consists of improving coordination of how and where excavated soil is used.
Sopköket is a Swedish restaurant and catering company founded in 20215. It prepares meals which partly incorporate rescued and surplus food from supermarkets and other companies. Their goal is to reduce food waste.
The City of Amsterdam’s Sharing Economy Action Plan (2015) is a strategy by the city to provide solutions for a sharing and circular economy (CE) that works for all.
It provides five key points on which action should be taken:
supporting pilot projects
leading by example
extending sharing economy to all residents
developing rules and regulations
development of a sharing city.
The intention is to widen the available tools and materials to enable the spreading of a CE, thus encouraging collaborative initiatives taking place in the city. Therefore, the plan facilitates the creation and spreading of more circular projects, such as the "fashion libraries" or the promotion of various digital platforms like the ones existing in the transport and accommodation sectors.
Circular Berlinis an NGO that focuses on making Berlin circular.
Berlin is envisioned as a resilient, citizen-oriented region where resources are sourced locally and their value is maintained as part of a continuous loop. Circular Berlin operates across areas such as community-building and education, as well as developing knowledge about industries with a high potential for circularity: the built environment, food and biomass, textiles and fashion, materials and products.
Circular Berlin hosts events where the community comes together to talk about key issues from sharing knowledge to collaborative planning sessions. Open-source digital tools enabling information to be exchanged more quickly have been built.
For more information on Circular Berlin, see their report.
Kitchen Dates is an environmentally friendly restaurant located in Lisbon. It has the particularity of operating without generating any waste - so no use for rubbish bins!
GoodAfter.com is an online supermarket focused on products near their recommended consumption date or, in certain cases, even after their "best-before" date.
Fab City Challenge is an initiative launched in 2014 by the then mayor of Barcelona, challenging cities to become self-sustainable by 2054. The project has now expanded into a sustainable cities network working on the digital transition, localisation and regenerative economy. One focus is combating food waste and using fresh produce which would otherwise have been thrown out.
Members have access to knowledge exchange, network events, research opportunities and engagement with like-minded cities around the world. They meet once a year at the Fab City Summit, where new cities also join the Network.
Distributed Innovation Workshops are also organised, where participants learn about various areas of innovation and sustainability.
BauKarussell is a consortium supported and co-run by industrial actors and the City of Vienna. It seeks to establish circular loops in the city's construction sector, with an emphasis on large-scale demolition. The platform focuses on compliance with new regulations and ensuring that reusable components are dismantled and made available for reuse through partnerships with large property developers.
Green practices are becoming standard practice in the construction sector in Austria, and this initiative is in line with that trend. Workers from social enterprises actually prepare material for reuse. It is estimated that the consortium could create around 9 000 jobs in Austria.
