EuroCommerce is the principal European organisation representing the retail and wholesale sector. It embraces national associations in 27 countries and millions of companies, both leading global players such as Carrefour, Ikea, Metro and Tesco, and many small businesses.
Tasks:
Representing national and sectoral associations and companies in the retail and wholesale sector
Informing its members about EU policy and legislation
Advocacy for suitable policy and legislative outcomes
Communicating on retail's contribution to society and the European economy
Facilitating knowledge exchange among members
The circular economy is an opportunity for retail and wholesale: consumers are demanding more sustainable products and businesses need to shrink their carbon footprint.
TOMRA is the world leader in reverse vending solutions. It provides an automated method for collecting, sorting and handling used beverage containers for recycling or reuse. TOMRA has approximately 105 000 reverse vending machines in more than 100 countries.
Unverpackt in Kiel opened in February of 2014, becoming Germany’s first packaging-free store. Their goal is to reduce packaging and food waste and at the same time motivate customers to reflect on their own consumer behaviour.
On 11 December 2019, stakeholders of the Retail Forum were introduced to the ECESP. Several discussions took place about the interest and role of retailers in advancing the circular economy in Europe.
The topic of ‘Retailers and Consumers’ was seen as an opportunity to start a leadership group to discuss and advance circular economy action between those two key stakeholder groups.
Swappis is a clothing retail store in central Budapest that attempts to counteract the linear approach of the fashion industry by introducing a business model that focuses on circularity and the reuse of second-hand clothes. Their membership loyalty mechanism is designed to build a strong relationship with customers by encouraging them to choose sustainable options.
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.
Jerónimo Martins, a food retailer operating in Colombia, Portugal and Poland, has implemented various measures to reduce the amount of food wasted in its operations and value chains, and promotes recycled and recyclable packaging.
The Data Centre Industry (DCI) is one of the most important pillars of current technological and economic developments.
In DCIs, more than fifty different materials can be found per product, including ferrous, non-ferrous metals, precious metals (PM), platinum group metals (PGM), rare earth elements (REE), plastics and/or ceramics, some being considered as Critical Raw Materials (CRMs).
This assessment aims to study DCI design and material composition (specifically servers and switches), as well as to analyse their performance in a circular economy and provide recommendations for ecodesign guidelines.
