Added: Oct 01, 2020
Last edited: Sep 15, 2021
The Dutch economy has set itself a national goal to become fully circular by 2050. Amsterdam has been a pioneer in city-wide circularity frameworks, which posed particular challenges because many parts of the journey were essentially unknowns. In order to assess the obstacles and opportunities in the city, Amsterdam commissioned a comprehensive scan of the city, which granted insights into the city-wide material flows. Through this method, two main value chains were chosen to focus on, and were integrated into the city's policies through procurement and partnerships with private actors. In 2018, an intermediate evaluation suggested that the transition towards circularity within Amsterdam is both realistic and economically profitable.
The Dutch economy has set itself a national goal to become fully circular by 2050. To reach this goal, economic centres such as the city of Amsterdam need to rapidly change their economic structure. The city faced particular challenges in construction, which was overwhelmingly linear, due to legal constraints to the amount of regulation it could place. Furthermore, Amsterdam has been a pioneer in city-wide circularity frameworks, which posed particular challenges because many parts of the journey were essentially unknowns.
In order to assess the obstacles and opportunities in the city, Amsterdam commissioned a comprehensive scan of the city, which granted insights into the city-wide material flows. Through this method, two main value chains were chosen to focus on, and were integrated into the city's policies. Amsterdam since made circularity a requirement in tendering housing development, and created networks and training opportunities for private actors. It has also started to lobby the adoption of circularity in wider Dutch standards and policies.
The report outlines the details of the city’s system processes and identifies the construction and organic waste chains as potential drivers of the transition to circularity and the long term effects each will have on Amsterdam’s current linear economy.
Added Value: Implementation of material re-use strategies has the potential to create €85 million of value per year within the construction sector and €150 million of value per year with more efficient organic residual streams.
Material Savings: The material savings could add up to nearly 900 thousand tons per year, a significant amount compared to the current annual import of 3.9 million tonnes currently utilised by the region.
Job Creation: Increased productivity levels have the ability to add up to 700 additional jobs in the building sector and 1200 additional jobs in the agriculture and food processing industry.
