EU environmental rules aim to ensure that end-of-life vehicles are managed sustainably. They seek to eliminate hazardous substances in cars and require that most ELV parts and materials are reused or recycled.
The Commission would like to hear your views on its proposal to improve collection, treatment and recycling of ELVs. You can give your feedback on this initiative until 19 November 2020.
Saccharides are a valuable and readily available source of renewable carbon. There are unique opportunities to produce renewable intermediate chemicals and polymers from regionally available agricultural products and imported feedstock in the period up to 2050.
Industry in the Chemport region (Northern Netherlands) has several options to further reduce CO2 emissions, including recycling or circular chemistry and shifting towards bio-based feedstock, acting as a catalyzer for other industries.
Important focus areas of the saccharide roadmap are:
The Ministry of Environmental Protection of the Republic of Serbia has developed a Roadmap for the circular economy in Serbia, a document that aims to bring together, connect and promote all those actors whose knowledge, innovativeness and creativity can contribute to a faster transition to the circular economy.
The roadmap seeks to encourage the private sector to use circular business models and to motivate industry to create new jobs, as well as to inspire a shift in business operations through the introduction of innovative and sustainable solutions. The roadmap has been developed by the Circular Economy Platform for Sustainable Development in Serbia project, which was initiated and implemented by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
The brochure "From Linear to Circular in the Textile and Apparel Industries - Let’s make the circular shift together" aims to give a push towards a circular textile industry. Circular economy strategies and business models have the potential to offer solutions for the textile industry:
The brochure highlights Dutch circular frontrunners that make a change - just a fraction of the initiatives, organisations and technologies available. Only the most inspiring examples have been selected, with a potential to be upscaled and implemented in other parts of the world, hoping that they will also inspire and encourage others to collaborate and make a change.
The European Commission has decided to launch a €1 billion call for research and innovation projects that respond to the climate crisis and help protect Europe’s unique ecosystems and biodiversity. The Horizon 2020-funded European Green Deal Call is open for registration. It will spur Europe’s recovery from the coronavirus crisis by turning green challenges into innovation opportunities.
A solvent-free adhesive that is suitable for recycling and also for bonding of recycled plastic films has been developed by Henkel to be used for multilayer packaging.
Participate in a series of short online events aimed to inspire housing organisations, policy-makers and communities. They will focus on circular economy in housing and on how communities can develop new homes or retrofit existing homes with minimal impact on the planet.
The aim of Poland's Roadmap towards the Transition to the Circular Economy (CE), which was adopted in 2019, is twofold: first, to identify cross-cutting measures capable of having the broadest possible impact in Poland, both socially and economically; and second, to prioritise areas that will enable Poland to take advantage of its current opportunities, and to deal with existing or future challenges.
The Roadmap focusses on 5 areas in particular:
The Roadmap includes a set of tools, which are not purely legislative, to create the conditions for a new economic model in Poland.
In Joure (NL) the Jacobs Douwe Egberts plant uses spent coffee grounds as a bio-fuel to produce the steam needed for its production process.
LIFEPOSITIVEMgOFDG - a project co-financed under the EU's LIFE programme - is about designing and implementing a novel technique for air pollution abatement which respects circular economy principles.
The CYCLE 2013-2017 interdisciplinary project, supported by the Research Council of Norway, focused on the food supply chain from both agriculture and marine sectors, with the aim to improve utilisation of raw materials in a bio-economical perspective.
Textiles and clothing play an important role in our everyday life. But the global fashion industry model is unsustainable. It uses large amounts of resources and has negative impacts on the environment and people. The global fashion industry, therefore, has to make a transition towards a circular model. In a ‘circular’ fashion economy, clothes, textiles, and fibres are kept at their highest value during use and re-enter the economy to avoid becoming waste.
This research note produced by Ecopreneur.eu is a first inventory of the potential impacts of future EU circular fashion on non-European textile producing countries. It uses existing literature and input from four circular economy experts to analyse the economic, social and environmental impacts.
Plastics represent a serious waste-handling problem with only 10% of the plastic waste generated worldwide being recycled. Plastics recycling is instrumental to close the loop of the circular economy by re-introducing into the economy high-quality plastic recyclates incorporated into new products.
The brochure highlights the importance of moving towards a circular economy for plastics in Europe. It identifies the most commonly used types of plastics and describes the current state-of-play, challenges faced by the European mechanical plastics recycling industry and key recommendations for overcoming them. Plastics recycling’s environmental benefits and economic importance are also touched upon.
The coronavirus crisis has disastrous human and economic consequences, revealing our system's exposure to a variety of risks. As the pandemic forces us to adapt our daily lives in ways we would not have imagined, it is also challenging us to rethink the systems that underpin the economy.
While addressing public health consequences is clearly the priority, before the crisis, momentum had already been increasing around the need for a system reset, and the potential of a circular model.
Far from the pandemic pushing the circular economy agenda to the bottom of the list, this article by Jocelyn Blériot at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation highlights and reiterates that it is now more relevant than ever, and sets out to explore the wider possibilities for recovery.
SCALER provides mechanisms to accelerate the journey towards efficient and quick implementation of industrial symbiosis in the European process industry. They do this by developing action plans and adapted solutions to industrial stakeholders and communities.
SCALER works closely with a wide range of stakeholders including industrial networks, consultancies, researchers and policy makers at various geographic and political levels, to deliver practical tools and guidelines for industry actors engaging in resource efficiency, reuse and sharing.
To achieve this goal, SCALER is developing a set of reports and guides. They offer insights into how businesses can start industrial resource synergies with other companies to minimise their waste and create more value from their production.
The Circular Aluminium Action Plan is the aluminium sector’s strategy for achieving aluminium’s full potential for a circular economy by 2030. The action plan aims to ensure that all end-of-life aluminium products are collected and recycled efficiently in Europe to maximise the aluminium recycling rates and to keep the material in active use. It builds on the aluminium industry’s Vision 2050 and provides policy recommendations for the sector.
The aluminium industry has the potential to be a key driver in achieving Europe’s ambitions for a climate-neutral and circular economy. Aluminium is by nature circular and fit for multiple recycling: it can be recycled over and over again without losing its original properties (lightness, conductivity, formability, durability, impermeability).
Professor Rebecca Earley introduces a series of short films about the design tools produced at the Chelsea College of Arts research centre, and how to use them to become a more sustainable and circular designer. The series aims to help designers access and use the research resources to stay inspired and motivated to design better futures.
How can the EU product safety and compliance framework help promote product durability and tackle planned obsolescence, foster the production of more sustainable products, and achieve more transparent supply chains for consumers?
Product longevity can play a useful role in achieving the Paris Agreement goals – material efficiency is an important contributor to energy efficiency and is also important in its own right. The product safety and compliance instruments available at European level can contribute to these efforts, if wisely applied.
This study was commissioned by the European Parliament Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO).
The fashion industry has a big influence on the global economy and is known for its social and environmental impact. This online course by Wageningen University & Research is an introduction to circular fashion, brought by 30 experts from academia and practice.
After this course, you will be able to:
Read more and enrol.
The FURN360 training course is a set of online modules offering 80 hours of training to understand the shift needed in the furniture industry to move to a circular economy.
The course allows to acquire the knowledge needed to transform an organisation into a circular furniture company, with a comprehensive approach across 8 learning modules:
1. Circular economy: an introduction
2. Circular economy in the furniture industry
3. Circular business model innovation in the furniture industry
4. Business management in the circular furniture industry
5. Sustainability in the circular furniture industry
6. Marketing the circular furniture
7. Supporting through advanced Key Enabling Technologies
8. Mini-case challenge
Research on Remelting and Purification of Si-kerf for PV wafers is part of CABRISS, a European collaboration aimed to develop a circular economy mainly for the photovoltaic but also other industries such as electronics or metallurgy.
During production of silicon wafers out of silicon (Si) ingots and wafers, about 40–50% of the material is lost due to the cutting technique. The research had kerf from slurry based wafer cuttings undergoing several refining steps and being remelted into ingots for PV-application.
Conclusion: With 10% refined material, ingots were still directionally solidified, whereas with 100% refined material, they were not. The presented refining method does not allow for ingots with 100% refined material to be used as PV-material.
The project Recycling of broken Si based structures and solar cells is part of CABRISS, a European collaboration aimed to develop a circular economy mainly for the photovoltaic (PV), but also for other industries such as electronics or metallurgy.
The paper presents some tests in which broken solar cell structures coming from an early stage in the PV production process chain as well as broken finished solar cells have been recycled into new silicon (Si) feedstock through demetallisation, purification and directional solidification.
The paper explores two different routes to remove diffusion layers and anti-reflection coating (ARC) on broken cells. It also presents the characteristics of ingots produced with the Si-feedstock from the two routes by directional solidification.
This report assesses the Aviation sector value chain in the context of Circular Economy principles.
It offers an overview of the aircraft lifecycle, new supplier-consumer programmes already initiated by the industry and a proposal for the reconversion towards a more circular business model.
The assessment of the value chain was carried out according to the Circular Economy perspective (Redesign, Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle).
This report advises the companies involvled in the EACP-EUROSME project, as an instrument to start the implementation process towards a Circular Economy business and as research for further financial support for project funding.
Cement recarbonation refers to the process where part of the CO2 emitted during the cement production is re-absorbed by concrete in use through carbonation.
This joint venture is a successful and genuine example of a short circuit circular loop where Veolia and Jacobs Douwe Egberts developed a solution to use spent coffee grounds from the plant’s production process to produce steam.
Ioniqa is a clean-tech-spin-off based in the Netherlands that has developed an innovative process to recycle all types and colours of PET waste into high quality pure raw materials that ensures a less impact on scarce resources like oil.
The research institute IVL has developed a new technology that may revolutionize textile recycling. It consists on sorting effectively clothes or other fabrics based on various types of fibres and it aims to increase efficiency and quality in textile sorting, therefore improving quality of recycled products.
