Longstanding research on wood cascading has identified a variety of factors to enable more efficient, circular use of forest-based products in Europe.

This paper finds that two of the most critical barriers to wood cascading are:

• Competition between energy and material uses of waste wood in policy, market and infrastructure
• Inadequate information on and low quality of waste wood, including pollutant content.

It makes the following recommendations for policies and business:

• Redesign production processes to deal with contamination and increase quality
• Coordinate energy and waste policies
• Advance reporting standards about material composition of bioproducts
• Explore the best forms of involvement, awareness raising, communication and policies.

Urban agriculture comes with its own share of environmental impacts. Circular strategies promise to reduce these impacts, but not all strategies are resource efficient and environmentally effective.

This paper finds that the most eco-friendly and circular strategies for urban agriculture, taking a Mediterranean tomato crop as a case study, include:

• Struvite (phosphate mineral recovered from wastewater treatment) instead of non-renewable phosphate fertiliser to conserve freshwater
• Recycled steel and materials for urban agricultural infrastructure to reduce carbon emissions, toxicity and freshwater pollution
• Closed-loop irrigation to minimise ocean and freshwater pollution. However, if new infrastructure is required, it could lead to an increase in carbon emissions.

This book provides answers on how to govern the transition to a circular economy in different socio-cultural and political contexts.

It is intended to help the global changemakers who are building our circular future. Author Jacqueline Cramer spoke with 20 representatives of circular hotspots worldwide, thoroughly analysed their different contexts and extracted 10 key takeaways. Everyone working on circular initiatives can use these and adapt them to their own socio-cultural and political contexts.

In this book, Jacqueline Cramer shows how network governance can power the circular economy. Network governance is about building a coalition of partners, which all fulfill a specific function in the network and are aligned by so-called transition brokers. By complementing conventional, public governance with this new form of governance, the best of both worlds is created.

Prof. Cramer shares her huge experience of implementing numerous circular initiatives in the Netherlands. As a practitioner and scholar, she has identified ten guiding principles for building circular initiatives, based on network governance. These guidelines can support everyone who wants to start or expedite a circular initiative.

Concern continues to grow regarding the availability of critical metals. Such rare or scarce metals, like lithium or cobalt, are not only vital to the world’s major economies. They are also crucial for a transition to a renewable energy system in the Netherlands. At current levels, the global supply of these metals is insufficient, and the Dutch demand for them is no exception.

This study Towards A Circular Energy Transition serves to provide insight into the demand for critical metals domestically over the next few decades, to offer perspectives on how to reduce this demand, and to demonstrate the opportunities these new measures present to industry in the Netherlands.

The goal of the circular economy is to take full advantage of all available resources through reducing, reusing, repairing and recycling. The recent Nordic Circular Summit in Copenhagen covered topics from public administration programmes to innovative techniques and renewable practices in the marine and food industries.

What can we learn about the circular economy from the Nordic perspective? Find some answers in this position paper.