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.
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.
The Business Action Group was created with the aim of transposing the latest international trends, generating further knowledge and collaborating with the public administration regarding potential circular economy national strategies.
Une centaine d’acteurs (décideurs, entreprises, collectivités, associations etc.) se sont réunis le lundi 27 janvier 2020 pour la conférence de l’Institut National de l’Économie Circulaire Loi anti-gaspillage pour une économie circulaire: quels changements pour les entreprises?
The Polish Chamber of Digital Economy, an Ecommerce Europe member, has published a report on sustainability in e-commerce.
This report, titled Green Generation, shows that Polish consumers generally spot environmentally-unfriendly behaviours of retailers, but they do not quite want to take responsibility for making e-commerce less harmful to the environment; only one in five consumers is willing to wait longer for a shipment to be delivered through a grouped consignment.
As they already engage in some environmentally-friendly practices, such as collecting parcels from dedicated points, they do not seem willing to take up financial responsibility, such as paying extra charges for more ecological packaging or deliveries.
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.
In the face of a growing global waste crisis, new corporate reporting disclosures are being developed by Global reporting Initiative (GRI) to help organizations better understand and communicate their waste impacts. It is in this context that the GRI Waste Standard is under development, and open to public consultation and comment until 15 July 2019.
ACR+ is co-organising a workshop to inform cities and network organisations of the opportunities of the European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform as a portal to strategies and case studies in CE.
The principle of Circular Economy is to keep raw materials within the economic cycle as long as possible while generating the lowest possible amount of waste and emission. To do so, end-of-life products and materials must be kept at the highest possible level of value creation according to their original use. Adapted logistical concepts to coordinate both material and information flows - in addition to innovative business models and new approaches to product design for recycling - are necessary to realise circularity in the economy.
The megatrend of digitalisation, especially through Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things, offers solutions that have not yet been applied extensively.
