Construction and demolition waste (CDW) - including soil - and organic waste (OW) are two of the most significant urban material flows with a remarkable environmental impact. Europe consumes between 1.2 - 1.8 billion tonnes of materials per year for buildings and infrastructure and produces around 130 million tons of organic waste per year.

CityLoops is a new EU-funded project led by ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability - focusing on OW and CDW. 7 (small-to-medium sized) cities will pilot the project, through which a series of innovative procedures, approaches and open access and open sources tools will be developed in order to embed circularity within the cities' approaches to dealing with waste.

The project is made up of three phases:

1.  Inception and preparation: preparatory analyses, stakeholder mapping and participatory planning actions
2. Demonstration: implementation and testing of solutions
3. Replication: upscaling of CityLoops measures at regional and European level. 

The solutions and actions include instruments to predict future CDW and soil production, awareness-raising campaigns, circularity decision-making tools, 3D simulations of construction impacts and procurement guidelines for OW products. 

Each city will undergo a sector-wide circularity assessment to help optimise the demonstration activities, as well as an urban circularity assessment to effectively integrate circularity into its planning and decision making. 

Cities will explore how public sector purchases can create markets for innovative circular economy products and solutions.

The Circular Cities Declaration, signed by political representatives from the pilot cities, has committed them to enhancing circular economy through policy and regulatory levers, to sharing knowledge with peers and to building a wider circular cities coalition with key stakeholders and initiatives across Europe.