The Interreg MED Green Growth Community will celebrate its final event in person in Brussels on 1 June. The event will highlight the role of businesses and public authorities in the transition towards climate neutrality, sharing the project’s best practices in supporting these actors across the Euro-Mediterranean region.
The final event will also emphasise the importance of cooperation to boost the circular economy by putting forward the Community’s policy recommendations.
Resourceful Cities is an URBACT Action Planning Network of European cities that want to develop next-generation urban resource centres to accelerate the transition to the circular economy. The idea for this network arose from one of the actions identified by the Urban Agenda Partnership on Circular Economy under its ‘better knowledge’ pillar - namely to promote Urban Resource Centres for waste prevention, re-use and recycling.
Broadly these centres serve as connection points for citizens, new businesses, researchers, and the public sector to co-create new ways of closing local resource loops, while promoting waste prevention, re-use, repair, and recycling. Their precise manifestation will differ from city to city in response to the local context and needs identified.
Ireland is at a turning point for the transition to a circular economy (CE). The 2022 Whole of Government Circular Economy Strategy provides the policy framework for the CE in this country, and the forthcoming Circular Economy Bill is expected to strengthen waste and CE legislation.
Nevertheless, with a circularity material use rate of 2% in 2020, Ireland shows significant scope for progress. This report analyses the state of play and challenges of the circular transition in Ireland and provides policy recommendations for CE policy across levels of government. It is the result of a two-year policy dialogue between the OECD, the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications, as well as a broad range of public, private and civil society stakeholders.
The European Food Safety Authority EFSA foresight workshop Circular Future: emerging feed sources, technologies & related risks will take place online on 9-10 June 2022. The event is open to policymakers, practitioners and stakeholders from along the feed value chain, as well as scientists and experts in emerging risk identification, risk assessment and foresight selected from among participants.
The LCA4Regions partners are organising a conference in Brussels on 12 May. This will be an opportunity to share their project's initial outcomes and discuss how to apply life cycle assessment (LCA) to improve policy planning and actively make conscious decisions about resource efficiency and investments, with a focus on the sustainable built environment.
On Thursday 28 April The European Commission invites you to an online event on the methods for measuring the life cycle performance of products and organisations: the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) and the Organisation Environmental Footprint (OEF).
Almost all countries in the UNECE region, covering the US, Canada, Eastern and Western Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia, have adopted national policies which are directly or indirectly related to the sustainable management of natural resources and the circular economy. On 6 April 2022, UNECE launched a new CIRCULAR STEP platform for policy dialogue on the circular economy.
This research project lists ecodesign criteria for circular fashion and textiles.
It focused on giving consumer textiles a longer lifespan with optimal reuse potential, making disassembly and recovery possible, and exploring upcycling and high-quality recycling. Extending the life of textile products turned out to have the greatest impact in the short term. Quality seems to be the most impactful ecodesign criterion when it comes to improving the sustainability and circularity of consumer textiles as quickly as possible.
The project defined seven product categories, identifying a set of minimum criteria for each. The report looks at existing labels, standards and regulations and the authors hope it will help expand the Ecodesign Directive by adding a textile category.
This webinar on 26 April will show you how to help your value chain reduce its carbon emissions to fight climate change, keep your business competitive, and stay legally compliant.
Many actors see the EU’s circular economy (CE) as a promising narrative which steps outside dominant end-of-pipe solutions towards an encompassing vision for strategies across the supply chain. However, this study finds that the EU CE Action Plan maintains the status quo narrative instead of suggesting radical changes.
By focusing on stakeholder narratives, this analysis shows that the inertia is primarily due to CE proponents’ self-perception of being in a legitimacy crisis and their strategic arguments that have:
The paper discusses how to develop new environmental narratives outside the status quo.
The circular economy (CE) is gaining momentum in cities. To ensure a sustainable CE, it is crucial to measure the environmental performance of CE strategies. However, environmental assessments overlook several strategies that are a key feature of urban CE practice. These include reuse and repair, sustainable built infrastructure and urban land use, green public procurement, smart information and access technology.
To provide insights into the environmental performance and potential of these strategies, industrial ecologists and municipalities should:
The slow flower movement is growing in Europe and aims to provide local, seasonal and organic flowers. Why? Because the international flower industry is very harmful to nature and has major negative impacts in developing countries.
Join the event on 21 April 2022 for the launch of the Circularity Gap Report Sweden to learn more about the state of circularity in Sweden and how advancing it can help strengthen climate action.
The Circulab Academy is an independent design studio and strategy consulting agency that helps organizations worldwide imagine and design regenerative solutions. It provides online courses based on powerful and open source circular design tools, created and enhanced by Circulab since 2014.
Now the Circulab Academy has a new free online course "Activate the Circular Economy".
The 4th OECD Roundtable on the Circular Economy in Cities and Regions will bring together key stakeholders from cities, regions, national governments, the private sector, civil society, academia, philanthropy and international organisations on 12 April 2022.
This literature review identified and categorised circular economy (CE) practices within all stages of the food and feed production chain in Europe to provide an overview of current and envisaged practices. There are four macro areas:
It is recommended that future primary research in novel food and feed in the CE focuses on areas other than insect farming, and that there are further investigations into the potential risks associated with importation into the EU of livestock/goods that may have been subject to different restrictions/legislation.
The Czech Circular Hotspot will be launched on 12 April with an opening ceremony in the Kampus Hybernská in Prague. The event is organized by the Czech Institute of Circular Economy.
Today the Commission presented a package of European Green Deal proposals to make sustainable products the norm in the EU, boost circular business models and empower consumers for the green transition. The proposed rules are to make almost all physical goods on the EU market more friendly to the environment, circular, and energy efficient throughout their lifecycle.
This event on 7 April aims to explore the concept of biofactories and present the technical advances of the projects ECOVAL and WALNUT. The social, legal and market barriers for the valorisation of high added value products for agriculture and industry, such as sludge or biofertilisers obtained from waste flows from urban water treatment plants, will be discussed.
On 23 March 2022, the EU Ecolabel officially turned 30 years old. With over 80 000 goods and services awarded the label across 24 product groups, the EU Ecolabel is widely recognised across Europe.
The CCRI aims to support Europe’s green transition by boosting circularity at local and regional level. The objective of this call is to select a group of cities, regions or territorial clusters to become the CCRI Pilot Group, which will bring together cities, regions or territorial clusters with a high potential for development in the field of the circular economy.
The 3rd Symposium on Circular Economy and Sustainability will take place in Chania, Greece on 27-29 June 2022. Researchers, practitioners and entrepreneurs are invited to submit both empirical and theoretical papers that are broadly consistent with any of the topics covered by the Symposium.
This book provides answers on how to govern the transition to a circular economy in different socio-cultural and political contexts.
It is intended to help the global changemakers who are building our circular future. Author Jacqueline Cramer spoke with 20 representatives of circular hotspots worldwide, thoroughly analysed their different contexts and extracted 10 key takeaways. Everyone working on circular initiatives can use these and adapt them to their own socio-cultural and political contexts.
In this book, Jacqueline Cramer shows how network governance can power the circular economy. Network governance is about building a coalition of partners, which all fulfill a specific function in the network and are aligned by so-called transition brokers. By complementing conventional, public governance with this new form of governance, the best of both worlds is created.
Prof. Cramer shares her huge experience of implementing numerous circular initiatives in the Netherlands. As a practitioner and scholar, she has identified ten guiding principles for building circular initiatives, based on network governance. These guidelines can support everyone who wants to start or expedite a circular initiative.
