With urban populations climbing, infrastructures, products and therefore rising resource consumption is expected. Cities, such as Sherbrooke, can develop roadmaps in order to tackle these challenges.

As critical economic and industrial hubs that are home to over 50 percent of the global population, cities drive 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, 80% of global GDP is generated in cities and ⅔ of global energy is used in cities. Through circular transition, cities can improve resource access, lower emissions, protect and enhance biodiversity, and reduce social inequities in line with the Sustainable Development Goals.

At the end of 2021, as a consequence of the twinning with other Canadian cities, the Municipality of Sherbrooke has embarked on the process of developing a roadmap. The city mobilised the Bureau de l’environnement and Synergie Estrie for this task.

The first milestones of this roadmap consisted in carrying out a material flow analysis with the collaboration of the University of Sherbrooke. This work helped identify the areas of intervention.

The city has given priority to land management, residual materials management and governance.

Land management was chosen so that the city becomes proactive in the management of industrial parks and allows better synergies between industries. Based on the significant impacts of waste materials on climate change, residual materials have been picked as a priority. The theme of governance was chosen to explore in more detail the actions that the city could consider to support in an effective way the transition to an economy affecting different sectors.

Thus, the strategic opportunity has been identified and translated into a circular opportunity, that will lead to the adoption of a roadmap in 2023.

So far, the material flow analysis has been made, as well as the economic analysis, the identification of relevant local strategies and policies, and a series of interviews were conducted. The next steps will be held in November and December 2022, consisting of defining the vision to be integrated into the first roadmap, the establishment of roles and budget, and getting the guidelines validated by the city council. Following these steps, the writing of the roadmap will be able to start in December 2022.

The 2023-2030 Residual Materials Management project plans to invest $211,000 over the next seven years in human resources and professional fees to support the deployment of the circular economy.

Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash