The Coordination Group decided, in Autumn 2019, to create leadeship groups to hold in-depth discuss and deliver orientations on priority topics.
The leadership group on cities and regions focused specifically on the territorial approach to the transition to circular economy at local and regional level.
The Life Cycle Innovation Conference (LCIC 2020) takes a systems perspective when discussing sustainable innovation. It will look at both, innovative approaches and methods to address sustainability challenges as well as innovative products and services that will help the transition towards a more sustainable world.
The travel & tourism industry has touchpoints with most, if not all, key value chains and material flows in society and is therefore very relevant to consider for the circular economy transition.
To guide a sustainable recovery and development of the industry post COVID-19, this publication introduces key circular economy principles and concepts in the context of travel & tourism. This report provides private tourism operators with a robust introduction to circular economy concepts and how these apply to their operations and business transformation.
It also offers guidance to policymakers, regulators, and trade bodies on possible circular economy-inspired policy and business development directions.
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.
The Environmental Protection Agency has launched a challenge called 'Innovating a Circular Economy for soft plastic in Ireland' under Enterprise Ireland’s Small Business Innovation Research programme. The challenge focuses on reducing/eliminating soft plastic waste generated through the provision of school meals in Ireland.
Nordic Innovation launches a series of workshops, free of charge, to develop collaborative pilots across industry ecosystems, that can be scaled to successful transition towards a circular economy, critical for innovation and economic growth around the Nordics.
From a “circular” point of view, the wide range of products considered to be "furniture" and the diverse use of materials in production (e.g. wood, plastics, textile, steel, glass, composites, foam) makes it a complex area to address.
The European Furniture Industries Confederation (EFIC) has drawn up a position paper that identifies challenges and opportunities linked to the circular economy transition, covering the different phases of manufacturing from supply of materials to the end-of-life phase, and that provides sector-specific expertise on EU Circular Economy policies.
The European furniture industries are ready to work together with EU institutions to create suitable tools for the sector, enabling it to move in the right direction.
Source: EFIC
ENEA, the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, is directly involved in activities focused on the assessment, proposal and selection of circular economy indicators.
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.
In response to increasing demand for online training, AIMPLAS has prepared 4 free webinars on themes related to plastics: solutions in the medical sector, new recycling technologies, quality control in the automotive industry and reduction of CO2 emissions.
Within the ECESP, Circular Change has promoted the role of creative industries with a focus on circular design.
In April 2020, European Aluminium launched its Circular Aluminium Action Plan, a strategy for achieving aluminium’s full potential for a circular economy by 2030.
All citizens and the wider community of stakeholders are welcome to express their views in a consultation on Waste shipments – revision of EU rules before 30 July 2020 (midnight CEST).
Over 100 participants joined the Circular Economy on the City Level webinar of the Collaborating Centre on Sustainable Consumption and Production (CSCP) which sparked interesting discussions about smart and efficient ways of leveraging the potential of cities and municipal utilities in the transition towards more circularity.
C123 is an EU-funded project aiming at transforming the largely available and unexploited methane resources into C3 hydrocarbons, particularly propylene.
Circular economy (CE) appears everywhere in Europe to be an adequate response to the challenges of resource scarcity. Driven by the development of the European CE Package, many initiatives to accelerate the transition are emerging, both on governmental and private levels, but they lack coordination.
In the wake of the new Circular Economy Action Plan published by the European Commission in March, the "Institut National de l'Economie Circulaire" (INEC) - member of the ECESP Coordination Group - and Orée have co-authored a study identifying the major CE networks in Europe in order to strengthen the cooperation needed to achieve CE ambitions. By so doing they have pursued their common aim to develop and disseminate a vision of an inclusive and unifying CE.
Read the full study.
This paper by GS1 in Europe highlights the need to structure product data to make it available for circular economy needs. If data isn't structured and can't circulate according to a circular model, it will be very challenging to reach the scale needed for the circular economy plan.
Open standards are a way of uniquely identifying products, locations, machines, packaging, etc. If "global open identifiers" (openly available references for products, etc.) are used, rather than closed-in systems based on data for one limited purpose, it will be possible to share data.
GS1 in Europe is a neutral, not-for-profit organisation dedicated to global standards to improve the efficiency, visibility and sustainability of products around the world.
Today, only 8.6% of the resources and materials in the global economy are reused or recycled.
A crucial transition to a circular economy is required to reach the environmental goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and to achieve countries’ climate targets as set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
In this context, it is essential to ensure that the transition to a resource-efficient and circular economic model also delivers on social objectives.
This paper introduces the relevance of the circular economy in the international development SDG context. It also explores how a just transition approach can be successfully applied in the circular economy context.
Following the publication of the new Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP) by the European Commission in early March, the members of the Coordination Group of the European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform have issued a joint statement on the CEAP, while also reflecting on the coronavirus pandemic ravaging the world.
The French "Institut National de l'Economie Circulaire" (INEC) and Orée have published a co-authored study to better understand circular economy initiatives dynamics at work in different countries.
This case study is a part of the MBB LIFE+ Investing in Water project. APS Bank decided to invest in a holistic on-site water conservation programme. The aim of the programme was to put the bank’s sustainability policy into practice, reduce operational costs and help conserve scarce national resources.
ETV4INNOVATION is a two-and-a-half-year long European Commission funded vocational education and training Strategic Partnership project under Erasmus+ programme. It has been designed with the aim to support the development and the implementation of an innovative practice and a new training path in the field of Environmental Technology Verification (ETV).
Rare Earth Elements (REEs) are considered as "key enablers" of green technologies. However, they are also the elements with the highest supply risk.
The EU funded project REE4EU has developed processes that may help to regain REEs from RE-containing waste streams.
The overall objective of the project is the "smart" exploitation of Petroleum Refinery Sludges (PRS) produced by the Refinery of Motor Oil Hellas in Corinth (Greece).
The EU-funded CABRISS project aims at pioneering a circular economy dedicated to handling the critical situation of recycling the considerable amount of photovoltaic waste for the photovoltaic, but also for the electronic and glass industry.
