Karma is a Swedish startup founded in Stockholm, November 2016. Their app connects surplus food from restaurants, cafes and grocery stores to consumers for a lower price. As a result, users eat great food for less and businesses receive an additional revenue stream — all while reducing food waste.
The Circularity Dataset Initiative by the Ministry of the Economy of Luxembourg develops an industry standard providing a regulated framework for circular data on products throughout value chains, from raw materials to finished products, from the use phase to re-usage and recycling.
The project addresses the difficulty for stakeholders to access reliable data on the circular properties of a product. Trade secrets are hindering transparency and reporting standards are lacking, forcing manufacturers to send out different data sets in diverse formats to customers and product platforms.
The objective is to save costs, increase value and enable circularity by developing a process and an internationally accepted dataset template, and data is verified through an auditing process.
MagicPallet is the first collaborative platform dedicated to the exchange of pallets in Europe. This platform allows anyone to trade, buy and sell their Europe pallets in the right place at the right time. Pallets are flat platform structures used to support goods in a stable manner during transport. They create efficiencies when it comes to handling and storing goods.
Companies wishing to increase the amount of recycled materials in their processes and improve the quality in process and product by using digital tools can now participate in the pilots of the research project Di-Plast.
Identifying the impact of the circular economy on the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods Industry: opportunities and challenges for businesses, workers and consumers – mobile phones as an example
Mobile phones, particularly smartphones, have undergone a period of rapid growth to become virtually indispensable to today's lifestyle. Yet their production, use and disposal can entail a significant environmental burden.
This study, commissioned by the European Economic and Social Committee and carried out by the Centre for European Policy Studies, looks at the opportunities and challenges arising from implementing circular economy approaches in the mobile phone value chain. A review of the value chain and different circular approaches is complemented by a scenario analysis that aims to quantify the potential impacts of circular approaches such as recycling, refurbishment and lifetime extension.
The study finds that there is a large untapped potential for recovering materials.
Reverse Resources is an Estonian company that offers an online “circular” solution that tracks and traces waste flows by connecting manufacturers, waste handlers, recyclers/spinners and brands on one platform by offering 360 degree transparency, data accuracy and real-time transactions on waste flows.
To prevent consumers from buying items they use only a few times a year, Usitoo enables customers to rent these instead. The cooperative has a catalogue of hundreds of items that its customers can rent with credit, thus making the possession span of these items much longer.
The textile industry is the second most polluting industry in the world. The Next Closet’s mission is change this and inspire people to invest in quality and reuse what they already have, so second hand can become the number one choice.
The Région Grand Est has five large cities (Metz, Mulhouse, Nancy, Reims and Strasbourg) and borders with Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland. It is the second largest industrial region in France.
Seven regional or circular-oriented organisations decided to join forces in order to set up a useful tool, promote their circular initiatives and bolster their expertise in this field. The result was plateforme collectif-grandest.org, which aims to bring all stakeholders together to develop a circular economy in Grand Est businesses.
It is a resource centre, with publications and a directory of circular businesses and initiatives. Members can join or create communities and access support when setting up a project. The platform also holds annual meetings.
Today, most electrical/electronic equipment (EEE) is not designed for recycling, let alone for circulation. Plastics in these products account for 20% of material use, and through better design, significant environmental and financial savings could be made. Technological solutions and circular design opportunities already exist, but they have not yet been implemented. Some challenges, such as ease of disassembly, could be resolved through better communication and by sharing learnings across the value chain. Instead of WEEE, we should focus on developing CEEE: Circular Electrical and Electronic Equipment. The case examples of this report show how different stages of the lifecycle can be designed so that circular plastic becomes possible and makes business sense.
