Cities can play a pivotal role in creating an enabling environment through regulations and incentives, but the private sector needs to collaborate and explore the cross-sectoral synergies required to achieve a circular model. There are immense opportunities for public-private collaboration in achieving goals that might not otherwise be possible for cities to accomplish alone.

Cities are embedding circular thinking in their utility processes, placing the onus on the private sector to come up with new business models that are both economically viable and ecologically sustainable. This could potentially result in a situation whereby circular products and services become the new market standard.

Over the past couple of years, as companies start to understand the opportunities that lie under the concept of circular economy, the circularity conversation has gained significant momentum. At the same time, national and regional governments are developing frameworks and regulations to promote the circular economy.

Effective policymaking is crucial to accelerate and scale up circular actions in the economy. It supports businesses in overcoming hurdles by stimulating innovative projects and long-term investments in circularity, facilitating collaboration and partnerships, and producing tangible results.

Learning from successful policies can help inform future policies to promote wider actions in other sectors and regions over time.

By highlighting some representative pioneers in circular economy policy, exploring key enablers from these policies, describing how other regions could replicate these enablers and providing recommendations, this publication aims to provide insights from the policy perspective and to feed into the ongoing development of other initiatives and policies related to the circular economy globally.

The Ecopreneur.eu landscape review of circular economy policy in the EU Member States aims to inspire these countries to accelerate their circular transition. Combining the EU's Monitoring Framework with other rankings, databases and reports, Ecopreneur presents 28 country profiles using a mix of quantitative data and qualitative information to highlight specific indicators. These range from waste generated per capita to voting behaviour on EU proposals on the circular economy.

The report also describes the current performance, initiatives, most relevant organisations, policies, challenges and examples of good practice for each Member State. The country profiles show 28 unique different trajectories towards the circular economy. Some countries and regions, such as the Netherlands, Scotland, Slovenia, France, Belgium and Finland, are already leading the way. Each country profile concludes with Ecopreneur’s recommendations, with the following overarching key messages for all EU Member States:

1. Start a Green Deal on Circular Procurement
2. Create circular “hubs” to support companies with circular models
3. Create a national circular economy roadmap with concrete targets
4. Improve and extend the extended producer responsibility (EPR) to cover ecomodulation of fees
5. Introduce low VAT rates for repair services, resold goods and transactions with clearly defined social goals
6. Create a “Green New Deal” to shift taxes from labour to resources
7. Shift investment away from municipal waste incineration.

The Circular Economy Competences, Making the Case for Lifelong Learning report, published by ACR+ and Zero Waste Scotland , builds on the workshop these orgnisations hosted in the Euroepan Parliament on 19 February 2019. It gathers the experiences participants shared in that workshop, and is meant to help educators, policymakers and managers of NGOs involved in training and educational organisations to promote the development of local circular economy loops.
 

The three chapters of this booklet cover different areas of the lifelong learning landscape:

• Circular thinking in education. Educational designers will find useful insights on the promotion of circular holistic approach in schools; a bird’s eye view on how tertiary education is integrating the circular economy into its educational offer; the creation of attractive learning pathways in adult training;
• Upskilling waste, repair & reuse industry. Policymakers and professionals in the field of vocational training will find useful references to the development of professional standards and competence profiles for the 3Rs industries;
• Facilitating the transition towards a circular economy. The last chapter contains an analysis of the links between Industry 4.0 and the circular economy in Italy and the case history of a network of municipalities that have developed training courses to equip local authority staff for the circular transition. In conclusion, a final article analyses the possible positive correlations between entrepreneurial education and the circular economy.