The Ellen MacArthur Foundation is a UK charity which aims to speed up the transition to the circular economy. Since it was set up, the charity has emerged as a global thought leader, putting the circular economy on the agenda of decision makers across business, government and academia.
Carsten Wachholz joined the Foundation in 2020 after spending two years working for the European Investment Bank on Corporate Responsibility and another four years working for the European Environmental Bureau on the first EU Circular Economy Action Plan. Carsten leads the Foundation's newly established Brussels-based team supporting the development of circular economy policies at EU and international level (e.g. G20, OECD), in close collaboration with the Foundation's systemic initiatives on plastics, fashion and food.
This online session on 2 June 2023, from 10:00 to 12:00 (GMT+2), explores how cities worldwide can unlock the potential of the circular economy at the local level, while promoting biodiversity and nature conservation.
Fashion for Change EU - with contributions from Michael Laermann and Arthur ten Wolde (Ecopreneur.eu), Mari Saar (Civitta), Maria Kristiin Peterson (EKA), and Justina Lizikevičiūtė- Grišinė (Katalista Ventures)
This Fashion for Change report illustrates the key business challenges and needs for circular fashion designers, start-ups and small and medium-sized enterprises, along with proven and recommended solutions to support them.
The report recommends a hybrid community model that interconnects physical local competence centres with digital platforms and online networks to provide access to relevant information, contacts and online tools along with specific training, coaching and funding programmes. This approach would need to be supported by effective policy instruments.
The analytic work has been co-funded by the COSME programme of the European Union via the call COS-CIRCFASH-2019-3-02: Accelerate and scale up innovation applications for a sustainable and circular fashion industry.
The Knowledge Hub is Circle Economy's collaborative library of circular economy case studies, gathering today more than 4800 ready-to-implement solutions from more than 100 countries with a monthly audience of 9000+ readers.
The model is open access and everyone can contribute. The Knowledge Hub is directly linked to digital products as it serves as the source for recommended solutions. It is based on the following three principles:
Everyone contributes: the knowledge base grows quicker if everybody adds case studies.
Everyone edits: It's not meddling, it's co-authoring! Version history ensures nothing is lost.
Everyone curates: See any irrelevant, duplicate or promotional content? Report it to the Knowledge Hub admins!
Threading-CO2 project aims to scale-up and demonstrate its first-of-its-kind technology producing high-quality commercially viable sustainable PET textile products from CO2 waste streams.
The overall objective is to significantly reduce the carbon footprint of the textile industry, using a circular manufacturing approach and running on renewable energy sources.
Re-using textiles locally is the most sustainable way to close the textiles loop as well as to deliver local jobs for the circular and just transition.
Social enterprises in the re-use sector seek to implement the waste hierarchy and abide by the proximity principle. As such, they manage to extend textile products’ lifetime locally while equipping vulnerable individuals with circular skills and building local communities.
This paper by RREUSE outlines good practices in responsible used-textile management carried out by our social enterprises community. It focuses on ways to improve textile collection and local reuse and bolster textile transparency.
Textiles are on average the fourth-highest source of pressure on the environment and climate change from a European consumption perspective, as shown in previous EEA briefings.
Europe faces major challenges managing used textiles, including textiles waste. As reuse and recycling capacities in Europe are limited, a large share of used textiles collected in the EU is traded and exported to Africa and Asia, and their fate is highly uncertain.
The common public perception of used clothing donations as generous gifts to people in need does not fully match reality.
In the course of two decades, there has been a threefold increase in EU used textiles exports
The University of Cambridge (UK) is running a sector-wide workshop on "Speeding up the Transition to Closed Loop Synthetic Fibre Recycling by 2030". It will help industry experts and policy makers co-create strategic policy solutions on how to speed up the transition away from the use of virgin and non-closed loop sources of synthetics towards a full closed loop textile recycling system across the European Union.
The workshop will be held online from 11:00 to 15:00 (London time) on Tuesday 28 February 2023.
The tExtended European project has come up with an innovative approach to recycling textile waste by developing a knowledge-based masterplan for optimised recycling of discarded textiles. The research combines recycling, waste-valorisation and data technologies to maximise the impact.
Twenty organisations from 10 countries have collaborated to create economically feasible and sustainable solutions for reducing waste in the textiles industry.
